A plot that rivals the best of con movies
The Hindu
Fake documents and antiques, premium vehicles used to convince creditors
A petition to the Chief Minister jointly submitted by six persons on how they were taken for a ride by Monson Mavunkal, the self-styled antique collector and amateur archaeologist who was arrested by the Crime Branch on Sunday, reads like the script of a brilliantly plotted con movie.
That the accused managed to cheat the victims of ₹10 crore seems beside the point while considering his ingenuity and audacity of plotting the con and sustaining it for nearly four years.
The forged documents from the finance ministry and banks purportedly showing that his ₹2.62 crore, proceeds from the sale of antiques abroad, remains frozen since 2010 as per the Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA) were the pivot around which he weaved such an incongruous story that it defies logic that people had actually fallen for it.
When fed into Latin, pusilla comes out denoting “very small”. The Baillon’s crake can be missed in the field, when it is at a distance, as the magnification of the human eye is woefully short of what it takes to pick up this tiny creature. The other factor is the Baillon’s crake’s predisposition to present less of itself: it moves about furtively and slides into the reeds at the slightest suspicion of being noticed. But if you are keen on observing the Baillon’s crake or the ruddy breasted crake in the field, in Chennai, this would be the best time to put in efforts towards that end. These birds live amidst reeds, the bulrushes, which are likely to lose their density now as they would shrivel and go brown, leaving wide gaps, thereby reducing the cover for these tiddly birds to stay inscrutable.
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