A day after Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee pleaded innocence in the school recruitment scam saying she had never encouraged corruption, Pradesh Congress president Adhir Chowdhury on Tuesday asked her to walk the talk by sacking arrested Trinamool Congress secretary general Partha Chatterjee from the State Cabinet.
In his letter to the Chief Minister the PCC president wrote the “Teacher Recruitment Scam was an open secret and everyone in Bengal knows about this. It was only after the court's intervention that investigation agencies started acting upon it. It is a huge blot on the government of West Bengal. I urge you to sack Partha Chatterjee from Ministership immediately.”
Industries and Parliamentary Affairs Minister, Chatterjee, considered the second man in the State Cabinet was the Education Minister between 2014 and 2021 when the scam — that allegedly runs into several hundred crores — took place.
The TMC reacted sharply to Chowdhury’s letter holding the him guilty of “double standards” even as its spokesperson Kunal Ghosh said “the same Congress cries conspiracy against the Enforcement Directorate when it summons Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi … but it rejoices when the same agencies are used against the other parties.”
The Congress leader’s letter to the Chief Minister comes at a time when another Trinamool Congress MLA Manik Bhattacharya was on Tuesday summoned by the ED officials. Bhattacharya a former chairman of the Primary Teachers Recruitment Board -— before he was removed by the Calcutta High Court a few weeks ago — has been asked to appear at the ED office on Wednesday.
He is likely to be questioned about the seizure from Chatterjee’s residence of a long “revised list” of “successful candidates” who had appeared in the Teachers Eligibility Tests (TET). According to sources the irregular appointment procedures in the TET followed the same pattern as in the other categories of school level appointments.
Meanwhile skeletons continued to tumble off Chatterjee’s cupboard with the ED getting reports of more than 50 landed properties including bungalows, apartments, resorts, farmhouses, international schools, beauty parlours, nail art parlours etc from various locations of Bengal including Kolkata, Hooghly, Jhargram, South 24 Parganas and North Bengal.
The ED is also trying to understand how much money had been siphoned off to other States and countries through hawala after stumbling upon some clues indicating Chatterjee’s links with some garment traders and professors with Bangladesh connections, source said.
The ED is known to have found information about one hundred dumpers (trucks) belonging to Chatterjee. These dumpers were used to carry sands from districts to the upmarket Rajarhat-New Town area of Kolkata. The ED sources were also trying to find out whether Chatterjee had any connection with illegal mining --- a charge on which some other leaders including TMC Birbhum district president and strongman Anubrata Mandal is already being questioned.
According to sources the ED has stumbled upon property deeds and documents related to joint accounts in the names of Chatterjee and his close aide a part time model-cum actress Arpita Mukherjee from whose residence the officials recovered about Rs 21.90 crore in cash and Rs 1 crore worth foreign currency and jewellery.
Both are presently in ED custody. Sources in the Agency on Tuesday said that while Mukherjee had revealed some information, Chatterjee was proving to be hard to crack.