There was more trouble for the ruling Trinamool Congress with the Enforcement Directorate investigating the school level recruitment scam on Wednesday submitting a supplementary chargesheet against jailed party MLA and former Primary School Board chairman Manik Bhattacharya.
In a 150-page chargesheet filed on the 58th day of his arrest the ED has identified Bhattacharya as the kingpin of the TET scam (involving recruitment of thousands of primary teachers, Group C and D staff).
In the chargesheet the ED has quoted 60 witnesses, submitted 6,000 documents including those related to 61 bank accounts.
The ED has claimed that Bhattacharya was responsible for perpetrating the scam and collecting illegal money which was then routed upwards.
Incidentally the Calcutta High Court had in an earlier order directed the investigating agencies including ED and CBI to find out the topmost people benefited by the scam leading the Opposition parties to wonder whether Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and her close aides were not in the know of the proceedings that involved more 22,000 fake appointments and transactions involving Rs 5 lakh to Rs 25 lakh per appointment.
The ED has also mentioned the names of Bhattacharya’s wife Satarupa and son Souvik who in the scam. While the former was found to be jointly holding an account with a dead person and transacting money there off in that account the latter through a number of coaching outlets collected crores from the private colleges imparting training under Diploma in Elementary Education a prerequisite for appearing in TET exams.
The CBI in the same case has informed the High Court how about 22,000 OMR sheets were manipulated and how 9,000 of them were simply destroyed. Sampling a few OMR sheets the CBI said how blank OMR sheets were submitted by the candidates and how 0 mark was converted to 53 marks and how 1 and 2 marks respectively were converted to 51 and 52 marks.