Conditioned as he was for not jumping at conclusions, Gautam wondered what, if by the law of averages, an oddball of a Loss Assessor turned up to call his bluff? Were that to happen, the tongues of fire the arson occasioned would all but consume his grand passion. And the money spent to stage-manage the show would go up in smoke, without a trace at that. Well, if he were to take the plunge, his claim should seem genuine even to the eyes of the most suspicious character.
Having prepared the road map to arson with ingenuity, Gautam surveyed it to see for possible pitfalls on the way. Though it seemed pucca all the way, just the same, he blueprinted the layout to detect design defects, if any. Finding none and noting that all macro and micro factors were featured into the coupe de fraud, he felt cocky and took the plunge.
It was thus, Ocean Organics, the proprietary firm floated by Sneha, soon came into being. Losing no time, Gautam took a sick chemicals unit at Faridabad on lease. The contract to modify the plant to produce sulubuloxine was awarded to Chemind Builders, the benami firm that Gautam himself floated. And that included raising the compound wall to eight feet height. So as to put the Ocean on the right side of the insurance claim, Chemind would exorbitantly bill the 250 TPY amalgamated unit.
Gautam went on a shopping spree for the scrapped chemical equipment and accessories in the junk markets of Ahmedabad and Bombay. In time, he managed to transfer them in their truckloads to the Ocean’s Faridabad site. As a decoy for the falsity, and to cover up the tracks, Chemind arranged accommodative bills for steel plates and pipes from Agarwala Traders, New Delhi. With the connivance of a transport operator, Consignment Notes were put in place for the fictitious transfer of Agarwala’s steel materials. As a foolproof measure, the MB of Chemind at the Ocean’s plant carried those quantities to the last kilogram. In a similar way all other plant accessories made their fictitious entry into the Ocean’s Assets Register.
As the local fitters were bound to raise their eyebrows, Gautam took no chances when it came to the wagging of tongues. So, he brought a gang of loyal Keralites from the backyards of Nagarjunasagar. At length, ‘the scrap equipment’ was transformed into ‘a junk plant’ of the Ocean Organics. All it took then to provide a facade to the ‘state of the art’ chemical plant was a generous coat of blue enamel that smelled fresh as well. When, in the end, as he looked at the completed unit, unable to believe his own eyes, Gautam was greatly pleased with himself. However, he sent away the Kerala gang and hired some semi-literates from Madurai to man the Ocean’s idle unit.