A woman, who decided to reportedly help an NRI couple by becoming a surrogate mother, has alleged that couple has refused to pay her the promised Rs. 5 lakh in lieu of her services. Kamaljit Kaur, wife of Sukhdev Singh, a resident of Dheerpur village, said UK-based Phagwara resident

Tarlochan Singh and his wife Gurbakhash Kaur requested her for help. They came in touch her as she worked at a local fertility centre.
“A baby boy was delivered on December 20, 2012. The couple gave Rs. 50,000 at the time of delivery and another Rs. 50000 was deposited in my bank account,” said Kamaljeet Kaur.

“After the delivery, the couple took the infant with them. I was not allowed to see the baby,” she said.
She alleged that the couple never gave her the promised Rs. 5 lakh and a small house and that she was being threatened.

Her husband Sukhdev Singh alleged that they had receiving threats to sign on certain documents to enable the passport of the new-born to be made and to facilitate the family’s movement to the UK.

Meanwhile, NRI Tarlochan Singh when contacted refuted all the charges.

“All these allegations are false. We had given promises amount to Kaur, even before the start of the procedure. She is being greedy. We are looking at other legal ways to get the passport made of my 6-month infant.”

DUBAI: A 33-year-old Indian worker in Saudi Arabia was arrested for allegedly attempting to cast a ‘magic spell’ on his employer.

The man has admitted to committing the crime and said he wanted to cast a magic spell on his employer in order to get rich quickly, police said.

The man, who was not identified, received an envelope from India containing “suspicious material” with which he allegedly wanted to cast a magic spell on his employer, but the envelope was seized before he could collect it, they said.

The Saudi Gazette report said that an official at the post office thought the envelope from India addressed to the man contained something suspicious.

The envelope was later found to contain papers with strange writings used for magic and sorcery spells and the Criminal Investigations Department was informed.

According to the paper, a trap was set in which the postman was replaced with a police detective and the addressee was called to receive the envelope.

He was then asked to name the contents of the envelope, to which he replied that the contents were supposed to make him rich instantly. The worker was then taken in for investigations.

Practicing witchcraft and sorcery are illegal under Saudi Arabia’s Islamic sharia law.

According to the newspaper, Jeddah Police spokesman First Lt Nawaf Al-Bouq confirmed that the worker has been detained pending complete investigations

LONDON: In the biggest ever penalty on an individual trader, the UK financial sector regulator FCA today imposed a fine of nearly one million pounds on an Indian-origin realty broker for fraudulent sale and renting of homes.
Birmingham-based Gurpreet Singh Chadda, who was doing business of sale and rent-back of homes through Red2Black Homes and B&L Homes, has also been banned from working in the British financial services industry, besides a fine of 945,277 pounds (nearly Rs nine crore), the FCA said.
“This is the largest ever fine for a sole trader in a retail business,” the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) said, adding that Chadda was deliberately misleading his customers for personal gains.
The order follows an FCA investigation into Chadda’s involvement in seven sale and rent back transactions between June 2009 and January 2010. The regulator found serious failings in all the seven cases, it said.
A sale and rent back transaction is an agreement where a home owner sells their home and then rents it back from the arranger so as to be able to carry on living in the home.
FCA said that people who sell their homes in this way are often vulnerable as they are in financial difficulties and need to raise money to pay mortgage arrears and avoid imminent repossession.
As per the FCA order, Chadda was misleading the sellers of the properties, who were his customers, by telling them he would be buying their homes when in fact the purchasers were other people.
Other charges against him included failure in notifying the sellers that the purchasers of their homes were not covered by the regulatory protections, while he also helped the purchasers to obtain mortgages while knowing that they were giving misleading information to mortgage lenders.
He also falsely claimed that the price the sellers would get for their properties would be based on an independent valuation. He was misleading the sellers about what their properties were worth, and also charged the sellers grossly unfair and excessive hidden fees, FCA said.

“In the seven sale and rent back transactions the FCA investigated, there was no independent valuation and Chadda assigned values to the properties based on the purchasers’ mortgage valuations or his own opinion.

“He assigned to two properties a market value which was significantly less than actual market value. In one case, he or his representatives fabricated a mortgage valuation to make it look as though the seller’s property was worth substantially less than its real value,” the regulator said.

According to FCA, Chadda helped the purchasers of six of the seven properties to obtain mortgages, while knowing that the mortgage lenders would not knowingly lend money on a sale and rent back transaction. He knew the purchasers were not telling the lenders the true nature of the sales, FCA added.

“In one case, he helped the purchaser to mislead the lender by drafting a letter that falsely confirmed that the seller would not be remaining in the property after the sale,” FCA said.

Although the sellers expected to get a discounted price for their properties, they did not know that Chadda was receiving the full price for the properties from the purchasers.

In two cases, he reduced the sellers’ share of the sale money by misleading them about the value of their property, and in one case he exaggerated the legal costs that the seller had to pay, to further reduce the amount the seller received.

FCA further said that in three cases the sellers got less than half of the value of their property, while in two of these three cases the seller only received 38 per cent of the sale price of their homes.

“The FCA believes that Chadda received 695,277 pounds from the seven transactions as a result of his misconduct, and that these charges were unfair and excessive. The penalty includes disgorgement of the whole of this sum,” the regulator said.

The FCA also charged Chadda of seriously aggravating his misconduct by making false and misleading statements to it and by failing to disclose relevant documents and information and creating misleading documents.
“He also arranged for people to impersonate his customers in order to mislead the FCA,” the regulator said.
Commenting on the order, FCA’s director of enforcement and financial crime, Tracey McDermott, said: “Chadda’s misconduct is the most shocking we have seen from a home finance arranger. He is a disgrace to financial services.
“He deliberately misled his clients for his own personal gain and then repeatedly and cynically lied to the FCA. Chadda is not fit to work in regulated financial services and he presents a serious risk to customers and lenders alike with his dishonest and unscrupulous actions.
“The unprecedented level of the fine for a sole trader reflects our determination to deprive him of the gains he made as a result of his misconduct,” McDermott added.

FCA has asked Chadda to pay the financial penalty within 14 days, that is by July 3, 2013, failing which it can recover the outstanding amount as a debt owned by him.

A 33-year-old Indian shopkeeper has been accused of bludgeoning his British wife to death with an ornamental wooden elephant. NRI Devendra Singh is accused of killing Charlotte Smith, 42, in a brutal attack on September 3 last year. Stafford Crown Court was told this week how Singh flew into a rage and battered Smith with the 2-kg wooden object at their home.

The Indian rupee plunged to an all-time low against a dollar-pegged UAE currency on Thursday, giving Non-Resident Indians a big boon as their remittance power rose sharply by Rs1.6 per dirham in weeks.
The rupee fell as low as 59.97 against the dollar, down from its Wednesday close of 58.72 and a May average of 54.9.
The dramatic fall was triggered by global investors who pulled out of emerging markets and the US signalled it could start scaling back on its monetary stimulus that has injected billions of dollars into the global financial system.

Foreign institutional investors have pulled around $3.75 billion from Indian stocks and bonds in June, according to the Securities and Exchange Board of India.

A falling rupee may bring cheers to NRIs but makes life all the more difficult for residents back home by stoking inflation.
The rupee has now fallen more than 10 per cent since the start of May, making it one of the worst performing major currencies in Asia.
The rupee’s sharp decline also sent Indian stocks and bonds tumbling on Thursday. Indian shares posted their biggest single-day decline in nearly 21 months.
Y. Sudhir Kumar Shetty, chief operating officer, Global Operations, UAE Exchange, said the scarcity of the dollar in the market, due to the control on dollar flow, had brought the rupee to its all-time low.
“The Indian economy has been going through a tough phase for sometime now. This new development has only added to the woes of the nation’s economy,” said Shetty.

“Remittance volume to India, which is already the largest receiver in the world, has definitely gone up. Indian expatriates are exploring every avenue to send as much money as possible,” said Shetty.

He predicted that the rupee would continue to be under pressure for some time to come, and its future depends on what measures India would take.
Sajith Kumar P.K, director and CEO of IBMC Group & JRG International, said the increase in current account deficit and fiscal deficit is the major domestic factor against the rupee.
He said some new steps taken by the India Government could slowly stop further fall of rupee. “However, a massive sell off by foreign institutional investors remains a major threat at present. If US dollar further strengthens, the rupee may touch 60 to 61 per dollar,” said Kumar.
Adeeb Ahamed, CEO, LuLu International Exchange, said the volume of rupee remittance had marginally gone up. “We have seen an increase of 10-12 per cent in the volume of remittance and number of walk-ins over the last fortnight. Expats have resorted to borrowing funds from the financial institutions to avail the benefit of rupee fall.”

“The depreciating rupee is not the finest news for the domestic market but for NRIs it provides a good opportunity to park their spare funds in India now,” said Alok Anchan, an executive at Rajesh LifeSpaces, a Mumbai-based developer.

“Temporary rupee depreciation has made property investments cheaper by over 25 per cent for NRIs over the last 12 months,” said Nishant Singhal, director, Strategy and International Operations at Investors Clinic.

HYDERABAD: A female software engineer lodged a dowry harassment case against her NRI husband, at Banjara Hills on Friday.
Banjara Hills police said that P Reshma, 35, and V Hima Teja got to know each other through social networking site Facebook. On April 22, they both got a registered marriage at Chirala and started residing at Gaurishanker colony, Banjara Hills road no 12.

Some days after getting married, Reshma came to know that her husband Hima Teja was already married to a woman in Canada. The victim informed the police that for several days, Teja harassed her for want of dowry and suddenly on May 16, he fled to USA. It is learnt that Teja is a green card holder. Banjara Hills police registered a case under 498 a (dowry harassment) of IPC.

NEW DELHI: An NRI businessman living in the United Kingdom got a rude shock when he found that his debit card had been ‘swiped’ at restaurants, malls and mobile stores in the Indian capital even while it remained in his possession. Sumant Kumar of Derby wrote an e-mail to the Delhi Police commissioner, Neeraj Kumar, and an FIR was promptly lodged.

Initial investigations by the crime branch’s economic offences wing have revealed that the victim’s card was cloned in January this year when he visited India. Police have gathered details of the mobile phones bought via the cloned card and are analysing their International Mobile Equipment Identity numbers to trace the accused. They are trying to procure CCTV footages of days the card was used.
Nine of 13 transactions worth around Rs 2.5 lakh were declined at ATMs and other outlets in Connaught Place while transactions worth thousands were successful at four electronic and mobile phone outlets.
Sumant wrote the police commissioner at his e-mail id-cp.neerajkmar@nic.in-on June 6.
As per Sumant’s complaint, his debit card was swiped at around 13 different merchant outlets between May 21 and May 23 even though it was in his wallet. Sumant claims he left India on January 21.

The transactions came to his notice only when the bank called him up to confirm them. When Sumant told bank officials that his card was intact, they asked him to prove it by conducting a transaction.
“On the request of the bank official, I swiped my card at a local ATM here in UK. However, as the card had already been blocked, no transactions could be carried out. I sent the bank a receipt of the declined transaction. I have lodged a complaint at the bank on May 31. The bank said I needed to file an FIR in this connection,” Sumant wrote. The cyber cell of the EOW wing has registered a case under Section 66 of Information Technology Act.

Initial investigations by the economic offences wing have revealed that thevictim’s card cloned in January this year when he visited India.

Award winning filmmaker, Sanjay Arora is back on the international festival circuit with his latest film ‘Once Again’ (Phir Vehi). Filmed in Delhi, this 50 minutes family drama is inspired from teachings of Buddha that revolves around Raj Malhotra (Protagonist), a self-centered company executive, who uses situations and people around him to his advantage but life takes an unexpected turn forcing him to accept reality that paves way to a journey of transformation.
The film opened at the Delhi International Film Festival 2012 and recently won the 3rd prize at the 6th Boomtown Film & Music Festival 2013 in Texas. It is also nominated for the Best South East Asian Film and Best Director at the World Music & Independent Film Festival 2013 to take place in August in Washington D.C.

Once Again reflects universal feelings that might may leave us evaluating our own lives. It takes this journey to depict the reality and the process of transformation that will impact many lives positively, said the filmmaker in a press statement. It was nominated for the Best Screenplay at the Hot Media International Film Festival 2012.
Delhi born, Chicago based Arora, left a successful software engineer career in the US to follow his dream of becoming a filmmaker. He joined New York Film Academy for a short program and never looked back. His past filmography includes award winning film Butterfly Wings, Expression and Chase. Butterfly Wings was screened in the US, Canada, India and Philippines including an invitational special screening held at the UN in Delhi and also won the Best Film award at the Global Film Festival 2011.

Do you want to know which restaurant is good? and ensuring the food is safe and correctly labelled.

The NSW Food Authority is the government organisation that helps ensure food in NSW is safe and correctly labelled and issues penalty notices if they breach.

You can check the restaurants “Name and Shame” list

The owner of Aki’s has hit back following the Woolloomooloo restaurant’s appearance on the NSW Food Authority’s Name and Shame list.
Fined $880 for failing to ”maintain the food premises to the required standard of cleanliness”, Kumar Mahadevan, owner of the top-rated Indian restaurant in the current SMH Good Food Guide, feels he’s been hard done by with the fine.

”Concord Council has just awarded us a five-star hygiene standard for our other restaurant, Abhi’s. We employ the same standards across both, yet the City of Sydney Council fine us. It’s a joke.”
Mahadevan claims inspectors pulled Aki’s up for having a knife rack too close to the sink. ”It’s been in the same place for 10 years. I think they should visit before or after service. The kitchen tried to tell them something wasn’t being stored, it had been pulled out of the coolroom to be used.”