The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Wednesday arrested a businessman in Kolkata on charges of money laundering linked to the alleged ₹20,000 crore public distribution system (PDS) scam in West Bengal, officials of the federal agency said. A court in Kolkata has remanded him in ED’s custody.
Biswajit Das, who runs an export-import business, according to ED, was arrested after a night-long interrogation at his home in Salt Lake on the eastern outskirts of Kolkata. As many as six properties and offices of the businessman were searched for 24 hours before the arrest was made.
Former food minister Jyotipriya Mallick was arrested in this case on October 27 last year. On January 20, ED told a Kolkata court that the scam involves around ₹20,000 crore.
The scam, in which subsidised food grains meant for the PDS system were siphoned to the open market for sale, took place when Mallick was West Bengal’s food minister between 2011 (when TMC came to power for the first time) and 2021.
An ED official said on condition of anonymity on Wednesday that the agency got information about Das from Trinamool Congress (TMC) leader Shankar Adhya, a former chairman of Bongaon municipality in North 24 Parganas district who was arrested on January 6. Das earlier lived in the same municipal area.
{{/usCountry}}An ED official said on condition of anonymity on Wednesday that the agency got information about Das from Trinamool Congress (TMC) leader Shankar Adhya, a former chairman of Bongaon municipality in North 24 Parganas district who was arrested on January 6. Das earlier lived in the same municipal area.
{{/usCountry}}Adhya is linked to 90 foreign currency exchange agencies and around ₹1,000 crore is suspected to have been siphoned out of India only through one of these, ED claimed before the court on January 20.
ED has claimed that Adhya is a close associate of Mallick.
On December 12, ED filed its first chargesheet in the case under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) naming Mallick, rice mill owner and hotelier Bakibur Rahaman and 10 shell companies.
Rahaman, who was arrested on October 14, was a key player in the siphoning operation in which his warehouses were used, ED said in the chargesheet.
On January 17, the Calcutta high court ordered the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and the West Bengal police to trace Sheikh Shahjahan, a TMC heavyweight from North 24 Parganas district’s Sandeshkhali who allegedly masterminded the January 5 attack on ED officials during a raid at his residence in connection with the PDS scam.
Shahjahan could not be traced till Wednesday even as Sandeshkhali remained on the boil following protests by local women who have accused the TMC leader and his associates of corruption and exploitation.