Emu and the never ending story of South Indian ponzi schemes

South India’s tryst with ponzi schemes that periodically sinks tens of millions of investor rupees is never ending.

Every time a fancy scheme that promised astronomical returns went bust, one thought this would be the last. But not in Tamil Nadu and Kerala where the theory seems to be the more you get cheated, the more you invest.

The latest to fly off with people’s money is a heavy Australian bird that we have seen only in zoos; the emu. People who trusted the bird and its golden eggs are now queuing up in front of police stations in western Tamil Nadu for their money.

The men who brought the emu into their lives, with the promise of an easy life just by looking at the exotic bird, are nowhere to be seen.

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This is a business that involves OPM (other people’s money). You spin a business model that looks highly realistic, collect money to the tune of at least Rs 100 crore and disappear. Although real estate, pyramid marketing, network-marketing, money-chain etc are the fraudsters’ flavour in the last the decade, the strange looking emu brings back the ponzi memories of the 1990s that promised multiplication of one’s investment through farming.

The first to attract OPM big time with a farming model was teak; followed by manchiyam, a fast growing tree; and goats. The latest is the Australia wonderbird.

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On Tuesday, Tamil Nadu police registered a case against a leading emu farming company in the western district of Erode for cheating its investors. More than 2500 harried men and women gathered at the office of the company, whose promoters have gone underground.

[caption id=“attachment_410638” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  The latest to fly off with people’s money is a heavy Australian bird that we have seen only in zoos; the emu. AFP[/caption]

According to district revenue authorities, at least 12000 people had invested in the company. Media reports said another 28 similar companies operated in the district.

There are about 250 companies engaged in emu farming across the state indicating that the money involved can be really huge. Apparently, some individual investments are as high as Rs 70 lakh.

It is not surprising that the emu business model sounds as simple as the teak-manchiyam-goat schemes of the 1990s. It is collective or contract farming of a high yielding agricultural product by a company for the investors.

The promoters with their simple combo of farming and arithmetic logic convince the investors that there is a huge unmet demand for their farming product. The value of the product combined with the periodic price rise, even at a modest rate, will translate into exponential returns. In this case, the product is emu-meat. In the nineties, it was the wood of teak and manchiam, and goat-meat.

In the case of emu, the latest star of the ponzi schemes, the detailed business model is not longer than a single sentence: the investor pays the company a certain amount of money, the company gives him/her the chicks of emu and sets up a shed to rear them in the investor premises, and takes back the birds when they are fully grown. For each emu growing in his shed, the investor gets about Rs 1000 a month. Reportedly, the promise is an easy tripling of one’s investment in five years.

As in the case of such money-spinning frauds, the business was very easy, didn’t involve hard work and the companies paid the monthly returns fairly regularly in the initial period. When they defaulted, the investors went looking for them only to see that they had disappeared.

The emu scheme is also a money-chain by itself. Each investor is encouraged (for a commission) to bring in more people. Some of them reportedly brought as many 20-25 other people into the network. That is how the investor-base grew into such a large number and kept growing.

The mother of all such agro-ponzi schemes was the hallucinating teak idea in the early nineties. A promoter in Chennai started it with what appeared to be a sound business model. He promised investors to plant teak trees for them on a piece of land in the hills that would be registered in their names. The teak would grow at a particular rate and multiply their investment-value (in terms of the price of wood) every year. By the time the teak was ready for use, their investment would have grown at an astronomical rate.

The promoter’s logic was convincing: he said there was an acute shortage of teak-wood in the country and what they were investing was on an ever-green commodity and hence the company had no problem in buying back their investment whenever they wanted to exit.

Several others followed suit. There was a real teak-rush that brought investors from all over the country. The prospective teak-farms, along with full-page advertisements, also spread all over the country. But the poor teak didn’t even have a stunted growth.

Barely when the teak mania died down, a set of fraudsters came up with the idea of another fast growing tree - not many had heard the name till then: manchiyam. Newspapers were again filled with advertisement of manchiyam schemes. Other than tricking people of their money, no manchiyam ever sprouted.

When the trees failed to grow, the next wave involved living things.

The first to appear was goats. The model was again simple - the promoters will have goat farms and the investors can buy a specific number of goats. When the goats get ready for the abettoirs, they would get their money back multiplied a few times. But no investor ever saw a goat.

After almost a decade, the ponzies are back with the emu.

This too will pass and somebody will come up with something else.

The original Italian conman, Charles Ponzi must be turning in his grave.