Charity concert in Lucknow cancelled; organisers missing, fans duped

Lucknow: A Charity Music Concert, scheduled to be held at the Ekana Cricket Stadium in Lucknow on Sunday, has been cancelled at the last minute after the organisers vanished after selling nearly 20,000 tickets for the programme.

The live musical charity event with Sunny Leone, Tiger Shroff and Himesh Reshammiya, was cancelled when the Ekana Stadium management received no communication for the past two days.

An FIR has been lodged for criminal breach of trust and forgery against the organiser and the director of Shree Suvidha Foundation Trust.

“The FIR was registered on the complaint of one Randeep Singh Bhatia of Patelnagar in Alambagh,” DCP South Zone, Rahul Raj said.

The DCP South Zone said a case of criminal breach of trust and forgery was registered against organizer Virat Arvind Trivedi, his wife Shweta and his brothers Jayanti, Derwali and Maulik and director of Shree Suvidha Foundation Trust, Samir Sharma.

The tickets were priced between Rs 500 and Rs 5,000, sources said.

In his complaint, Bhatia said he gave housekeeping services in Ekana Stadium and also used to provide services to other government and private institutions.

He said he met Virat in August at Ekana Stadium and he told him he was going to organise a musical event with the help of his partner Samir Sharma, who is director of Shree Suvidha Foundation and needed 110 staff members for the event.

“In the due course of time, Virat lured me into arranging vehicles at a low price and got me to transfer Rs 14 lakh in the bank account of Virat Travel and Cargo. He later provided me with an insurance policy for these vehicles and later got it cancelled without informing me,” Bhatia alleged.

He said on Friday he came to know that Virat had not given advance money to any of the stars he had claimed to be performing in the show and the programme was likely to be cancelled.

“I then contacted Virat and asked him to refund the money he had taken from me. He refused to pay the money and later switched off his mobile phone. Not only this, his partner also switched off his phone,” he alleged.

DCP Raj said that so far, no fan has turned up with a request of lodging an FIR in the case.

After the controversy, the show automatically disappeared from the app for booking of tickets.

In a statement, Ekana Stadium authorities said that due to non-submission of related documents and required NOC copies from related departments, except police department NOC, Ekana Cricket Stadium declared the ‘Charity Music Concert’ as cancelled.

–IANS

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