<div>Rose Valley Group chairman Gautam Kundu has 700 acres spread across 12 states, 23 hotels, 150-odd cars, including a dozen imported luxury vehicles, 900 branch offices and 3,078 bank accounts, according to the Enforcement Directorate, reports the <em>Economic Times</em>.</div><div> </div><div>Kundu, who is currently in jail, has some 23-odd hotels across the country includes luxury properties in Jaipur, Jalpaiguri, East Midnapore, Siliguri and Kolkata. It has seven premium residencies at the northern fringes of Kolkata; a 6,000 square feet villa in Ranchi and a gold and diamond jewellery mall. </div><div> </div><div>On March 25, 2015, Kundu was arrested by the Enforcement Directorate on the charge of money laundering.</div><div> </div><div>The lifestyle of Kundu, who owns a Rolls Royce Phantom, has been a talking point among the Tollywood film fraternity.</div><div> </div><div>His companies have produced at least 40 Bengali films and three of them won national awards. The group has been associated with some of the leading directors such as the late Rituparno Ghosh, Goutam Ghose and Kaushik Ganguly.</div><div> </div><div>According to media repots, both the Saradha Group and Rose Valley started collecting cash during the Left regime and had the blessings of some CPM leaders who are no more. When the Left was voted out, the owners of the two companies were quick to align themselves with Trinamul leaders.</div><div> </div><div>In the years Trinamul has been in power, Rose Valley expanded its business basket by becoming active in film production and media. The group was also the lead sponsor for the IPL team Kolkata Knight Riders for two years.</div><div> </div><div>Rose Valley was one of the 13 companies in Bengal that was being watched by the Union corporate affairs ministry after it received complaints that the firms were running cash-collection schemes.</div><div> </div><div>In December 2014, Union finance minister Arun Jaitley had told the Rajya Sabha in a written reply that the estimated amount collected by the Rose Valley Group of companies was around Rs 15,000 crore.</div><div> </div><div>The meteoric rise of Gautam Kundu and Rose Valley, a relatively small firm operating out of Tripura with some business stake in Bengal, began when his elder brother's car fell into a lake, killing his entire family. Kajal Kundu, who established the company in 1997, and his wife and son were on their way to Guwahati from Agartala when the unexplained accident killed them in 2003, following which Gautam Kundu took over the firm, according to a report in <em>The Telegraph</em>.</div><div> </div><div>Gautam Kundu hardly looked back since then.</div>
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