After Rose Valley now Narada. Mamata Banerjee Government faces more embarrassment as the Calcutta High Court on Thursday questioned the State as to why the investigation into the Narada sting and bribery case should not be handed over to the CBI.
The ruling Trinamool Congress was currently under immense pressure after the CBI arrested the senior party leader and MP Sudip Bandopadhya in the Rose Valley chit fund case.
In what could give additional goose bumps to at least a dozen of Trinamool MPs and Ministers-already smarting under the chit fund pressure-acting Chief Justice Nishita Matre asked Trinamool MP and senior counsel Kalyan Banerjee as to why the case should not be handed over to the CBI throwing out the plea of advocate’s plea that the State police was capable enough to probe the case.
A sting video tape aired in March 2016 showed a galaxy of TMC leaders including MPs Sougato Roy, Aparupa Poddar, Prasun Banerjee, Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar, Sultan Ahmed and Ministers Subroto Mukherjee, Firhad Hakim, Sovan Chatterjee, Subhendu Adhikary apart from a senior IPS officer accepting bundles of cash from Narada journalist Mathew Sammuel who presented himself as a prospective investor seeking favours.
While Banerjee pointed out that the timing of the video referred to 2014 whereas it was aired just before the 2016 Assembly elections proving conspiracy angle the Court said it was more concerned about the content of the footage than character or intent of the person who shot it.
Hence the Court said a CBI investigation was necessary more than anything else to ascertain the truth of the matter. The genuineness of the footage had already been ascertained by the Chandigarh-based forensic laboratory vide a HC order.
Meanwhile the Rose Valley case tended to take a new turn with the investigators having come to know about a new method through which the Trinamool leaders including ministers and MPs extorted favours from jailed chit fund Moghul Gautam Kundu.
Sources said a jailed MP and some of Ministers-who had met Kundu several times in 2013-14 at a five star facility off the EM Bypass in Kolkata -had told him that it was increasingly becoming difficult for them to handle so much of cash taken from him. Hence he was requested to pay them in gold.
Kundu bad by that time invested hugely in jewellery business in the name of his daughter. The gold outlets set up then were still doing business.