A city court on Thursday remanded senior IAS officer and Kolkata Port Trust Chairman, RPS Kahlon to 8-day police custody. A special team of Kolkata Police had on Wednesday evening arrested Kahlon from a five-star hotel in central Kolkata allegedly when he was taking bribe from Jgtap Dattaji, a Mumbai businessman.
While Rs 20 lakh was seized on Wednesday, subsequent raids at his bungalow yielded Rs 4.5 lakh, sources said adding another Rs 11 lakh was recovered from the room of Dattaji. However Kahlon’s lawyer told the court that the arrest made by the police was a ploy to frame him as he had last year taken a strong action against a film production house owned by a producer close to the ruling Trinamool Congress.
The news had hit the front-page headlines even as the Kolkata Port Trust a subsidiary of the Ministry of Shipping got the production house evicted from a huge tract of land being forcibly occupied for years and from where the house ran its film business.
The incident had reached such a pass that it almost brought the KPT and the Trinamool Congress’ frontal organisations face-to-face. But finally following a High Court order the land had to be evicted.
The lawyer of Kahlon Debabrata Sinha the Judge at Bankshall Court that the 1984 IAS officer had an unblemished record and that he had not been arrested with the money in his possession. However the Judge held that the investigation was in its initial stage and the police custody of the accused would be in the fitness of things.
The duo had been charged under the Section 120B—criminal conspiracy—of the Indian Penal Code and also under various other sections of the Prevention of Corruption Act.