PACL Director Nabbed in Punjab (Representative Image)
National News: In a major breakthrough, the Economic Offences Wing (EOW) has arrested another absconding director of Pearls Agrotech Corporation Limited (PACL), Gurjant Singh Gill, from Mohali, Punjab. Gill has been accused of playing a key role in one of the biggest financial frauds in India’s history, where investors were duped of nearly ₹49,000 crore through false promises of land plots and high-return schemes.
Officials confirmed that Gill will be produced in court and brought to Jalaun on transit remand for further investigation. His arrest is connected to cases registered by aggrieved investors in Jalaun, where thousands of people claim to have lost their life savings. Notably, two months earlier, another PACL director, Gurnam Singh, was arrested in Ropar, Punjab, in the same case.
The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) is running a parallel probe into the scam. It had earlier arrested Gurnam Singh in Delhi under a separate case and sent him to judicial custody. Investigators describe PACL’s operations as a textbook Ponzi scheme, where money collected from new investors was used to repay older ones until the entire chain collapsed.
According to officials, PACL managed to lure around five crore investors across ten states by presenting itself as a land development company. The firm claimed to offer affordable residential and agricultural plots in exchange for recurring deposits (RDs) and fixed deposits (FDs). These so-called “investment schemes” were marketed aggressively through local branches.
In Uttar Pradesh alone, PACL set up offices in Mahoba, Sultanpur, Farrukhabad, Jalaun and several other districts. Thousands of middle-class families and small farmers invested, hoping for secure returns and land ownership. Similar stories of fraud emerged from Punjab, Assam, Rajasthan, Delhi, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, Bihar and Chhattisgarh.
Following multiple complaints, the Uttar Pradesh government assigned the case to the EOW. After an internal inquiry, the EOW registered a case in 2018 through its Kanpur sector against the company’s top operators. The arrests of Gill and Gurnam Singh mark important steps in the long-running investigation, though victims continue to demand swift recovery of their money.
Records show that PACL was originally incorporated in Rajasthan in 1996 as Guruvant Agrotech Limited. It was re-registered in 2011 under its current name, with its headquarters in New Delhi. Despite lacking approval from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the company illegally began banking-like operations, collecting deposits worth thousands of crores from unsuspecting investors.
Investigators say that after raising enormous sums, the company’s promoters siphoned off funds and went underground, leaving behind a financial disaster that ruined millions of families. With Gill’s arrest, authorities believe they are a step closer to unraveling the full scale of the fraud and bringing all accused to justice.
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