Police complaint filed against Prakash Jha by ‘Jai Gangaajal’ co-producer

The co-producer of ‘Jai Gangaajal’ has filed a police complaint with Amboli police station against its director Prakash Jha’s production company, alleging fraud and cheating.

Jha co-produced Priyanka Chopra-starrer ‘Jai Gangaajal’ under the banner of Prakash Jha Productions. The film released in March, 2016.

“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,” Play Entertainment CEO Milind Dabke said in a statement today.

Play Entertainment, who has also collaborated with Jha on the Arshad Warsi-starrer ‘Fraud Saiyaan’, said the company was to supposed to grant all copyrights of the film to them, but instead sold the copyright of sound recording 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 said.

However, a top official of Jha’s company has refuted all allegations and deemed them ‘baseless’, claiming that the case has been filed with the intention of gaining cheap publicity.

“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,” Prakash Jha Productions CEO Sunil Agrawal told reporters.

Agrawal said that for ‘Jai Gangaajal’, Play Entertainment had already written over 10 letters to collect the master copy of the film. However, the copy was withheld as the requisite payments were not made.

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

“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 said.

Meanwhile, Bharat Gaikwad, senior police inspector of Amboli police station, acknowledged that they have received the complaint and investigation is underway.