Last year, in October, the Chennai police had received a pen drive containing the visuals of a minor being sexually assaulted. It came to light that the man in the video was an influential mining baron in his early 80s. However, in a major travesty of a process, the police tried to close the case.
The investigation was reopened in July 2026, and on August 29, the police arrested Rangaswami Veeramani, founder of GEM Granites and the GEM Group of Companies, along with Mahendra Simhan, MD of Gem Software Solutions, and his wife, Shanthi, who are accused of facilitating the alleged offences at their house. The three were produced before a court and remanded in judicial custody.
While the police had first attempted to drop the investigation claiming that the child’s identity could not be confirmed, a Special Court judge for Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) refused to accept the police’s closure report, forcing the Chennai police to reopen the case. The re-investigation led to the recovery of a gadget containing what is described as the original visuals of the assault from one of the accused’s residences.
TNM tried to fill in the gaps of how systemic corruption and lack of will led to the prolonged denial of justice to the child, while the perpetrators remained shielded by power and influence.
The pen drive containing assault visuals
It was last year, on October 6, 2025, that a child rights activist approached the Anti-Vice Squad of the Chennai police and handed over a pen drive containing a video that showed a minor girl being sexually assaulted.
According to the police, the activist said that an unidentified person had visited her office and handed over a pen drive containing the footage and a letter. She also told the police that a note that came with the pen drive said that the man in the video was GEM Granites founder R Veeramani and the assault was happening at the house of Mahendra and Shanthi.
Police sources told TNM that the CCTV footage had a timestamp dating back to 2019.
No progress for a year
According to the police, upon receiving the video footage and the complaint, an FIR was registered against Veeramani and Shanthi under the POCSO Act and sent to the court.
In October 2025, investigating officers apparently made several attempts to identify and locate the minor, but there was no breakthrough.
At that time, the suspects Veeramani, Shanthi, and Mahendra Simhan were questioned by the Anti-Vice Squad and, according to the police report, all of them denied the allegations. They also denied that the incident took place at their residence and said the man seen in the video was not Veeramani.
Speaking to TNM, a child rights activist said that if the police were unable to locate the victim, they could have sought their help. However, the case was never brought to their notice, and the child rights activists' network in Chennai was unaware of the development.
Another activist said that the police ought to have identified the victim and ensured her safety.
With no breakthrough in identifying or locating the victim, the AVS team decided to file a closure report and drop further action. It was the POCSO court’s intervention that changed the course of things.
What changed this year
In February 2026, the Chennai police's Anti-Vice Squad (AVS) told the Special POCSO court that it could not identify the girl seen in the video or establish her whereabouts. Hence, the police wanted to close the case.
The judge rejected the police report and ordered further investigation, questioning how the police could fail to identify the scene of the alleged crime despite having a video in their possession. Fresh orders were issued in July 2026 to the AVS team to reinvestigate and conduct searches.
The court's intervention led to a dramatic turn of events.
Searches were carried out at Mahendra Simhan’s residence in Teynampet, where the police recovered what they described as the original video of the sexual abuse from a gadget, a police officer involved in the investigation told TNM. Mahendra Simhan is the managing director of Gem Software Solutions, which is a sister company of the GEM Group.
The police also found that there had been an attempt to destroy evidence. The gadgets seized during the searches have been sent for forensic examination.
Gem Spinners India Ltd, which is a group company, has informed the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) Department of Corporate Services that the managing director of the company, R Veeramani, was remanded in police custody on August 29.
“As per information known to us, the outcome of the custody will be intimated in due course as soon as it is known to us,” read the mandatory disclosure.
Mahendra Simhan and Shanthi’s role
According to the police, Shanthi has known Veeramani for a very long time. In her statement, she told the police that she had lent money to Veeramani when he started his business and that they had known each other since then.
Shanthi lives with her husband, Mahendra Simhan, in a rented bungalow in Teynampet, and Veeramani used to visit the bungalow frequently. Shanthi has also told police officials that Veeramani sometimes held official meetings at her bungalow.
Along with Veeramani, Mahendra Simhan and Shanthi have been arrested in connection with the case for allegedly failing to report the sexual abuse of a minor. They have also been charged with destruction of evidence.
Investigators have also found that Shanthi had threatened to expose Veeramani and had received money from him. The police have found evidence of financial transactions between the two.
The police have also seized photographs of other women from the gadgets of the accused, as well as exchanges of messages between the accused and their aides. Investigators are trying to ascertain the identity of the persons involved and whether they have been subjected to sexual abuse.
What the police closure report says
In its final report that was filed in the Special POCSO court on February 18, during the investigation, the AVS team said they tried to identify the person who dropped the pen drive at the child rights activist’s office. There was no CCTV in the office, and the CCTV cameras in the surrounding areas were not in working condition.
The report further said that the AVS team also conducted searches at the residence of Shanthi, and no prosecutable evidence was found during the searches. In her statement to the police, Shanthi said she was unaware of the minor seen in the video.
“I knew nothing about the person resembling a young girl in the video and that the location shown in the video was not part of her home. I do not allow outsiders into my home,” the report read.
The police also said that during the course of the investigation, they found that previously, Shanthi had employed four domestic workers, but they could not be traced.
Further, the police questioned a person named Nagarajan who was running a puncture shop in the same street where Shanthi’s house was located. The police wanted to verify if he was a witness to any activity at Shanthi’s residence. “They don’t allow any outsiders into their house,” Nagarajan told the police.
The AVS team also conducted an inquiry with Saravanan, who was working as an administrative officer of a popular eye hospital located near Shanthi’s residence. According to the final report, Saravanan told police that he knows Shanthi and Mahendra and that they don’t allow outsiders into their residence.
Strangely, convinced by the statements made by Nagarajan and Saravanan, the police seemed to have concluded that no outsiders were allowed into Shanthi’s residence where the offence had been committed.
Since the video footage was recorded from a CCTV in 2019, the AVS team had also deployed a cyber expert to verify the Digital Video Recorder (DVR), but they could not retrieve the data. “An examination of the DVR recovered from the scene of crime by cyber experts indicated that the original recording no longer existed due to the lapse of six years,” the final report said.
Ultimately, the final report mentions that the police came to the conclusion to drop further action in this case based on two reasons. “The names of suspects involved in this case (Veeramani, Shanthi) were subjected to cross-verification on Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and Systems (CCTNS).
“A check via CCTNS revealed no prior involvement of the suspected individuals in other cases, and there was no information available regarding the age of the girl seen in the video footage. Consequently, there are currently no grounds to proceed with the investigations, and the case is therefore being dropped,” concluded the final report submitted by the AVS team.
Unanswered questions
The investigation, or the lack of it, in connection with the case has raised a barrage of questions: Why did the first investigation fail to identify the victim despite the suspects being questioned? Why did the police fail to conclusively establish the crime scene? Why did the investigators seek to close the case despite a video showing a child being sexually abused? Why was crucial digital evidence unearthed only during the reinvestigation? How did the video reach the person who eventually handed it over to the AVS team?
So far, the Chennai police have not ordered an internal inquiry into the handling of the case and the lapse in the investigation.
The police are also trying to find out if there are more victims and are awaiting the cyber forensics report, which could throw more light on mining baron Veeramani’s antecedents.