Prakasha Jha’s company accused of fraud

The co-producer of Priyanka Chopra film Jai Gangaajal has filed a police complaint against its director Prakash Jha’s production company, alleging fraud.

Jha co-produced Jai Gangaajal under the Prakash Jha Productions banner.

“In a breach of the MoU filed between us for Jai Gangaajal, we are yet to receive the master copy of the film, which is causing losses to our production house as we are not able to execute any commercial deals or sell satellite rights to any TV channel in the absence of the original copy,” Milind Dabke, Play Entertainment CEO, said in a statement on Sunday.

Play Entertainment has said in the case of another collaboration with Jha, the Arshad Warsi film Fraud Saiyaan, though the agreement was to grant all copyrights to the company, the copyright for the sound recording of the film was sold to another music firm.

“Therefore, it clearly suggests that at the time of executing the MoU, the fact that music rights were sold to another company was intentionally suppressed,” Dabke added.

An official from Jha’s company has, however, dubbed the allegations as baseless.

“They are trying to create a case which is not tenable at all. All this is being done for cheap publicity by using a big banner like ours. If they continue to unnecessarily harass us, we will have no other option but to file a harassment case against them,” Sunil Agrawal, Prakash Jha Productions CEO, told reporters.

Agrawal said he has already written more than 10 letters asking them to collect the master copy of Jai Gangaajal, which was initially not given as due payments were not made.

“We later realised we will not receive money so decided to simply give it to them so that the film does not suffer,” he said.

“As far as Fraud Saiyaan is concerned, we were already bound by a deal to sell music rights of three films to the music company, of which Fraud Saiyaan was one of them. Later, we requested the music company to relinquish their right over the music of this particular film, which they did. Thus, all music rights remain with Play Entertainment,” Agrawal added.

Meanwhile, Bharat Gaikwad, senior police inspector of Amboli police station, said they have received a complaint in the matter and an investigation is underway.