CBI finds ₹50 lakh cash, 1.5kg gold from ex-advisor’s flat in recruitment case
CBI alleged the flat from where the cash was seized was a benami property held in someone else’s name by ex-advisor of West Bengal School Service Commission, Shanti Prasad Sinha
KOLKATA: The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Wednesday found ₹50 lakh cash and 1.5kg gold during searches at a flat in east Kolkata in connection with its probe into irregularities in the school recruitment case in West Bengal.
A CBI official said the flat is suspected to be linked to Shanti Prasad Sinha, a former advisor of the West Bengal School Service Commission, who was arrested in the recruitment case in August last year. CBI alleges that Sinha and his wife allegedly paid for the flat in the name of another person.
“CBI searched the flat and recovered ₹50 lakh cash, 1.5 kg gold, property document and a list containing names of around 1,500 candidates,” a senior CBI official said.
An enquiry committee set up by the Calcutta high court in December 2021 said in its report that Sinha gave letters, recommending the appointment of disqualified candidates, to secondary education board president Kalyanmoy Gangopadhyay, who sent these to various schools.
The report said 222 of the 381 people appointed as Group C staff by the state government neither passed the written examination nor appeared for the personality test
Sinha and Ashok Saha, who was a secretary of the state school service commission, were among the first two officials to be arrested by CBI in August last year. The Enforcement Directorate was conducting a parallel probe to trace the money laundering aspects of the bribes in which former minister Partha Chatterjee and his aide Arpita Mukherjee were arrested and ₹50 crore in cash seized in July last year.
Chatterjee was dropped from the cabinet by chief minister Mamata Banerjee and suspended from the party. In October 2022, another Trinamool Congress legislator, Manik Bhattacharya, was arrested in this connection.
Last week, CBI’s additional director Ajay Bhatnagar came to Kolkata to take stock of the investigation into the school recruitment cases after the federal agency drew flak from the Calcutta High Court.
