The Saradha fire has now begun to threaten Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s backyard.
For the first time since his arrest in the Saradha chit fund case about 11 months ago, suspended and jailed Trinamool Congress MP Kunal Ghosh — considered one of the prime accused in the case — on Saturday took Banerjee’s name, literally implicating her in the multi-crore scandal.
Ghosh, who also worked as the CEO of Saradha’s news channels and media empire, told both the trial court and newsmen that the Chief Minister was the biggest beneficiary of the Saradha media projects. The CBI now investigating the multi-crore ponzi scam should bring Banerjee, Saradha chief Sudipto Sen and himself face-to-face to know the truth, he asserted.
“If anyone who has benefitted the most both directly and indirectly from the Saradha media projects it is Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee,” the jailed Trinamool MP alleged even as he was taken to the CGO complex for a fresh round of CBI grilling.
Soon after he made the remarks sources in the central agency said they were looking forward to extract “volumes of what he knows about the crucial connections between the influential people he is naming and the Saradha scam”.
Ghosh pleaded his case himself on Saturday at the trial court where he urged his investigators to jointly grill Banerjee, Sen and himself.
Curiously, Ghosh’s statement comes barely a day after Banerjee had accused the media of trying to falsely implicate her name in the scam and former party leader Asif Khan telling a television channel that he had seen the Trinamool leaders transform economically from a state where they had to fight for two square meals and the one when they had hard cash between `100 crore to `1,000-crore.
“There were days when I saw many Trinamool leaders who did not have two square meals. But today they have `100, 500 or even 1,000 crore. From where this fund has come only they can answer.”
Insofar as I am concerned, I can show them my bank accounts and statements if they come to me,” Khan had said on Friday. In what seemed to be a crucial step on the part of the CBI, the investigating agency took a fresh remand of Ghosh.
This will be crucial in the sense that the CBI is going to file the first chargesheet sometime next week,” agency insiders said adding at least eight names including that of Sudipto Sen, Debjani Mukherjee, Manoj Nagel, Sandhir Agarwal, Debabrata Sarkar, Somnath Dutta were likely to figure in the chargesheet.
Reacting to the news, CPI(M) leader Sujan Chakraborty said: “Finally the sin committed by the Chief Minister and her men through Saradha is coming to light and everything will come out if Mamata Banerjee is made to go through a lie detection test.”
BJP State president Rahul Sinha said: “Trinamool’s house is on fire and its members are now running helter-skelter. Now time has come when those who are connected with the case will point their fingers at the people who are directly involved in the case.”
However, rubbishing Ghosh’s statement, Bengal Education Minister Partho Chatterjee Saturday said that the jailed leader was making “reckless comments because he knows that he has no way to escape punishment for what he has done and so he is trying to divert the attention towards the Chief Minister”.
State Urban Development Minister Firhad Hakim said: “It is a sin to implicate Mamata Banerjee because the world knows that she is a paragon of honesty and integrity.”