In a major blow for the ruling Trinamool Congress in Bengal, the ED on Friday recovered at least Rs 20 crore from the house of Arpita Mukherjee, a close aide of Bengal Industries Minister Partho Chatterjee, sources said.
The count of notes could go further up, sources added.
The ED raided 14 locations in Bengal, including the houses of senior Trinamool Congress (TMC) leader and Industries Minister Partho Chatterjee, his Ministerial colleague Paresh Adhikari, party MLA Manik Bhattacharya and a bevy of former senior education department officials.
The raids are linked to the recruitment scam in the West Bengal School Service Commission and West Bengal Primary Education Board.
The recovered cash is suspected to be proceeds of crime of said SSC Scam. The search team is taking the assistance of bank officials for the counting of cash. Apart from the currency notes, 20 I-phones, gold and other ornaments have also been recovered, sources added saying three counting machines had been employed to count the notes.
“Initially Mukherjee’s house was not in the list of premises to be raided ... But after finding her name in one of the documents during a raid at Chatterjee’s house the officials raided her house and recovered the notes,” ED sources said, adding documents related to huge amount of properties too have been recovered.
The ED raids came barely a day after Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee asked her party men to boldly face the Central agencies when they go calling at their doors as a part of the BJP Government’s alleged conspiracy to harass and malign the TMC.
The raids that started early in the morning simultaneously on residential premises of junior Education Minister Adhikari at Mekhliganj in North Bengal, Chatterjee’s house at Naktala and Bhattacharya’s residence at Jadavpur in Kolkata were still continuing 14 hours later when reports last came in. Bhattacharya who was ordered to resign his post earlier by the Calcutta High Court is the former chairman of the porimary teachers’ recruitment board.
The ED staff had blocked entry and exit of all the residents of the respective premises and had temporarily seized the mobile phones of the police personnel on duty at the residence of the Ministers.
According to sources, the investigating agency was interrogating Adhikari’s wife and daughter Ankita who had last month lost her teaching job in a Government-aided higher secondary school following a High Court order that faulted her for usurping the job belonging to
Babita Sarkar, the petitioner who had scored higher marks than the Minister’s daughter.
Former CBI Joint Director Upen Biswas, who had cracked the animal husbandry case earlier, had told the High Court how he had been approached by agents “selling” school jobs for anywhere between Rs 10 lakh and Rs 25 lakh for various categories.
A judicial committee appointed by the High Court led by Justice AK Bag too had indicted the Ministers, former officials recommending criminal cases against them for selling thousands of posts and depriving thousands of genuine candidates.
The Justice Bag committee had even termed the “advisory committee” created by Chatterjee as “illegal” as the Minister had no authority to superimpose a committee on the SSC which itself was an autonomous body responsible for conducting recruitment.
While the Court had already dismissed about 800 people for illegally securing their appointments on various posts the total worth of the scam could involve several thousand crores, sources in the CBI said.
Thousands of successful candidates who had their names on the merit lists but failed to get a call had been sitting on dharna for the past several months seeking early appointment.
“The modus operandi of the scamsters was very simple ... they would first take money and then ask the candidates to sit in the exams without writing their papers … subsequently their papers would befilled in by others … in many other cases the candidates who approached the ‘agents’ later would get jobs after by-passing the genuine candidates whose names had figured in the merit list,” sources said.
Meanwhile, the Left Front and the Congress questioned the timing of the Friday’s raids wondering why the ED swung into action barely a day after Mamata Banerjee decided to abstain from taking part in the vice presidential elections.
“The chronology of developments is intriguing … firstly the then Governor Jagdeep Dhankhar who has been at loggerheads with the Chief Minister meets secretly with her in Darjeeling for 2 and a half hours … then the CBI submits chargesheet in the coal scam without mentioning a senior TMC leader referred to as Bhaipo (nephew) whose name often figured as a beneficiary in the coal racket … then the Chief Minister takes decision of not taking part in V-P elections and then the very next day when the Opposition would raise the issue the ED conducts sudden raid apparently to divert attention,” said CPI(M)’s Sujan Chakrabarty, adding however, in the final run the culprits would have to go to jail.
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