With the Bengal Assembly elections little less than a year away the Central Bureau of Investigation has once dusted up its chit fund files in the multi-crore Sharada and Rose Valley cases.
Acting on expected lines the Central investigating agency is planning to submit the final chargesheet in the ponzi fund cases, sources said adding the charge-sheet would contain the names of a number of Trinamool Congress leaders and police officers.
The list would contain the name of at least one senior IPS officer for trying to hush up the case, insiders said. Besides the name of some lesser officers would also be there in the list. The names of a senior BJP leader and a retired IPS officer have been included as witnesses, sources said.
When asked to comment an official said that the charge-sheet was likely to be submitted sometime in November though “no final decision has been taken about this.” Incidentally investigating officers involved in the probe were changed in last month with an equal number of Additional SP rank officers from the neighbouring State Bihar joining the investigation.
When asked to comment on the preparations to file the final charge sheet the TMC leaders said they were prepared for the “BJP Government’s pre-election onslaught which will gradually diminish after the elections and after Mamata Banerjee roars back to power for the third time in the State.”
The 2,000 crore Sharada chit fund case was busted in 2013 leading to the arrests of its CEO Sudipto Sen and other senior functionaries. Subsequently following allegations of senior Trinamool Congress leaders’ involvement in the case a petition was filed by Congress leader Abdul Mannan in the Supreme Court seeking CBI investigation which was granted in 2014 amid allegations that in the intervening time the State police had tampered with the allegations.
As the investigation peaked senior TMC MPs and Ministers like Sudip Bandopadhyay, late Tapas Paul, Kunal Ghosh and Madan Mitra were jailed. While a retired ADG Police was taken into custody, former Kolkata Police Commissioner Rajiv Kumar was grilled for several hours and on repeated occasions for his alleged complicity in hushing up the case.
This even as Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee cried victimisation by the BJP. In the meantime TMC’s number two man Mukul Roy left his party and joined the BJP months after he too was grilled in the Sharada case.
Meanwhile, in an unrelated development hundreds of TMC workers staged demonstrations in various parts of Bengal including protesting against the alleged deprivation of Bengal by the Centre.