The CBI is ready with ‘beamers’ for senior Trinamool Congress leader and Kolkata Mayor Sovan Chatterjee in the Narada sting case.
Considered as Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s Man Friday apart from being the State Fire Brigade Minister, Chatterjee may face some vicious questions from the CBI sleuths, not only for his politico-executive stature but also because the footages show him accepting cash from a Narada sting journalist right inside his official enclosure, sources say.
In the video tapes, the officers not only find him accepting wads of currency notes before quickly wrapping it up with a white towel that covers his high backrest but also allegedly hears him assuring the sting journalist, disguised as a fake prospective investor, of a meeting with the nephew of a top leader of the party.
The investigators want to know whether the said ‘nephew’, also an MP is genuinely into such kickback business or more clearly whether Chatterjee has on previous instances got other deals clinched through the said MP.
Apart from Sovan Chatterjee, another person the officials are planning to interrogate in the initial rounds is Trinamool MlA Iqbal Ahmed the brother of party MP Sultan Ahmed who reportedly introduced the sting journalist to all other leaders shown in the footage like Firhad Hakim, Subhendu Adhikary, Suburto Mukherjee, all Ministers and Sougato Roy, Kakolighosh Dastidar, Prasun Banerjee, Aparupa Poddar and Mukul Roy, all MPs.
The CBI officials believe that “intense questioning” of Chatterjee could help them reach many other leaders who are not in the footage but whose name often have been dropped by the leaders.
Currently, summons have been sent to two persons, sources said. These two persons are: Ismail, a taxi driver who regularly drove Narada CEO and the said journalist to his appointed “destinations,” and Tiger Mirza, a persons who is in real estate and syndicate business with wide contacts in the upper echelons of the Trinamool Congress.
In fact, Tiger was the one person who reached Samuels to Iqbal Ahmed who then ensured the services of his elder brother to approach the other top leaders shown in the footage and against whom FIRs have been filed by the CBI after a preliminary investigation following a Supreme Court order.
The CBI is relying more on the footage related to Chatterjee because during the conversations, names of a number of leaders — including one who has a national appeal — have been taken.