At 28, Zahir Rana appeared to be fortune's son. CEO of a Rs 300 crore empire, owner of a satellite TV channel, courted by the who's who of society. So when he presented former Indian cricket captain Kapil Dev with a spanking new Mercedes in February, everyone thought it was in the fitness of things that one baron should be on such good terms with a past maestro.

Then on May 26, Rana found himself in handcuffs in Ahmedabad for defrauding lakhs of people through a baffling money-multiplier scheme. Sensational as the arrest was, the headline grabber was the seizure of the blue Mercedes C180 hundreds of kilometres away in Delhi on June 13.

STIGMA OF ASSOCIATION: Kapil Dev insists he knew nothing of Rana's chicanery

Rana, the police say, fraudulently collected Rs 100 crore from investors. His modus operandi reveals how he was able to intelligently work on the foibles of the rich and famous. Kapil Dev, and his Mercedes Benz, is a case in point. The trendy, if flashy, Rana launched a multi-level scheme called recharge4all.com in which a subscriber could earn money by getting others to register as its members. To convince investors of his bona fides, the former student of St Xavier's, Ahmedabad, would flaunt his closeness to people who mattered, bolstered by photographs of him in the close company of such people.

Rana knew he could leverage a "proximity" to Dev. He approached Dev's Ahmedabad associate, Hiren Hathi, to sound out the former cricketer on attending a company function in Mumbai. Rana assured Hathi he would give Dev a Skoda Octavia car if he accepted the invitation. Incidentally, Hathi is also close to Ajay Jadeja and his company AJ Promotions and had been interrogated by income tax and CBI agents in the match-fixing scandal that allegedly involved both the cricketers.

Hathi told Rana a few days later that Dev preferred a Mercedes instead. Rana pleaded that he could not afford such an expensive gift but, say the police, he was told he could avail of a hefty discount from Mercedes Benz India.

Germany-based Daimler-Chrysler gave its Indian unit special permission to sell Rana the Rs 23 lakh car for Rs 18.5 lakh on the ground that Dev, selected Wisden's Indian cricketer of the century last year, could be the Merc's unofficial brand ambassador. The bill was paid by Remo Marketing with a cheque drawn on a Delhi bank. The car was registered in Dev's name. Police say the car was paid for with funds collected through illegal means.

The seizure of the car and its subsequent transfer to Ahmedabad as the Gujarat Police's "case property" put Dev on the back foot with snide asides about his complicity in the scam. Dev insists the car was gifted to him and that he was not involved with Rana in his chicanery. "I did nothing wrong," he stresses. Says a police official: "Stars like Kapil owe something to society. They shouldn't accept gifts and invitations from people like Rana without checking their antecedents."

MERCEDES C 180 Costs Rs 23 lakh but Rana acquired it for Rs 18.5 lakh and presented it to Kapil Dev.

Rana had used similar ruses to get himself photographed with the who's who of the political, industrial and entertainment worlds, including with Amitabh Bachchan, Sahara's Subroto Roy, Mulayam Singh Yadav, Amar Singh and Farooq Abdullah. "He has a knack for winning people over with his suave ways," says the investigating officer, Sidhrajsinh Bhati, superintendent of police, Economic Offences Cell, Crime Branch.

Police got on Rana's trail after Gujarat Minister of State for Home Amit Shah ordered a probe into the working of multi-level marketing companies in January. Says Shah: "The police acted against Rana after a lot of legwork. We have a strong case." They have identified assets worth Rs 5 crore, among these two flats in Ahmedabad, a Rs 55 lakh flat in Mumbai, a posh office in Ahmedabad and seven cars. They have frozen the Rs 1.25 crore that Rana had put in an escrow account for the planned purchase of a water park near Ahmedabad. A Rs 35 lakh farm at Rana's ancestral village of Napa near Anand has also been attached.

Rana came face to face with his changed circumstances last week when the court denied bail to him. It said the stakes in the case were very high and Rana could slip out of the country in case he was given bail. Rana knew his credibility had caught up with him. Dev, on the other, is fighting to keep his intact.