Techies taken for a ride as LBPPL goes defunct

AHMEDABAD: It���s a typical case of ambitious business plans of an aggressive company going haywire and the victims are unsuspecting fresh grads from reputed institutions all across the country.

At least 2,000 of them. Aware, ambitious and armed with top degrees like BE and MCA. With students registering protests from all over the country, it now looks more like some fly-by-night operator, making a fast buck with lucrative job offers.

The case came to light when the new recruits were confronted with downed shutters in various cities of the country. The students move court after the promoters could not be traced.

Delhi-based Life Business Projects Pvt Ltd (LBPPL), which claimed to have interests in business consulting, software development, engineering products and media, went on an aggressive recruitment drive in September last year.

The company promoters on their website even claimed that their wholly-owned subsidiary Life IT Ventures Pvt Ltd would soon come out with its initial public offer in the first quarter of 2008.

As per one of the postings on company website as on September 30, 2007, Life Group had over 2,200 employees. The website www.lifeforeveryone.org is claiming Chaturvedi family���s connections with some of the politicians and government agencies.

With big plans in the bag, the company hired close to 2,000 graduates, most of them engineers and masters in computer applications (MCAs). The grads were charged Rs 75,000 per head with a promise that a stipend of Rs 2,500 would be paid for the first four months until the regular salary in the range of Rs 10,000-Rs 20,000 starts.

The money taken was to curb attrition and was refundable. The company recruited from a dozen major cities including Ahmedabad, Delhi, Chandigarh, Coimbatore, Greater Noida, Hyderabad and Nagpur for its local branches in the cities.

The affected students from Ahmedabad are from reputed institutes like Nirma University, UV Patel College of Engineering of Ganapat Vidhyanagar and National Institute Of Co-operative Management (NICM) of Gandhinagar.

Interestingly, the list of directors of LBPPL has all four people with same surname Chaturvedi holding positions like chairman and non-executive director, CEO, CFO and COO.

The new recruits fear a loss of Rs 75,000 per head, which they deposited as guarantee money to assure the recruiters that they will not quit. The company was supposed to return the guarantee money to the candidates within 18 months.

Email queries sent to LBPPL whole time director and CEO Bhuvnesh Chaturvedi and five OSDs remained unanswered for over three working days. The cellphones and wireless phone lines at the company���s Delhi headquarters were switched off when ET tried to reach them repeatedly. All an official from the company���s Delhi office has to say is that ���One of our senior officials has been granted interim bail.���

On condition of anonymity, an LBPPL employee told ET that there were reports of failure of payments to employees in other branch offices too.

���I have learnt that there is some problem with the promoters in Delhi. They have failed to pay the salaries and deposit money. I have the information that the promoters are unable to operate the company efficiently on account of some legal issues at the headquarters. But we have been conveyed that the company will try to clear its outstanding as soon as possible,��� company���s local operation head Piyush Dalsania over telephone.

In Ahmedabad, the company���s CG Road office is locked, and it is said that the promoters have failed to pay to its vendors who have now seized the computers and other hardware. Majority of the company���s documents including appointment letters carry the signatures of Mr Dalsania instead of other top officials who are no longer in touch with the employees in Ahmedabad.