ED raids Kolkata premises in lottery case; BJP targets TMC
A warehouse of the lottery company at Michael Nagar in North 24 Parganas district was also raided by ED officials on Friday.
NEW DELHI: The Enforcement Directorate raided at least three places in Kolkata between Thursday night and Friday as part of its inter-state operation in which around 20 premises allegedly linked to lottery operator Santiago Martin, commonly known by the moniker “Lottery King”, were raided in several states, agency officials aware of the operation said.
“Two premises in the Lake Road area of south Kolkata are being searched since Thursday night by officials from Kerala. A huge sum of cash and records have been seized,” an ED official said on Friday evening on condition of anonymity.
A warehouse of the lottery company at Michael Nagar in North 24 Parganas district was also raided by ED officials on Friday.
ED officials said searches were being carried out in Tamil Nadu and Sikkim as well. The officials, who brought currency counting machines to the Lake Road premises, seized around ₹3 crore.
Martin’s office and home in Coimbatore and several premises in Chennai and other cities were raided since the early Thursday following the Madras High Court reopening a 2012 probe into alleged money laundering by the lottery operator.
Bengal’s opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) alleged that Trinamool Congress leaders as well as the state government received money from Martin’s company. Leader of the opposition in the legislative assembly, Suvendu Adhikari alleged that TMC received ₹600 crore in electoral bonds.
“The TMC government has been given ₹4,000 crore by the lottery company as tax and the party received ₹600 crore in electoral bonds. The lottery operation is a scam. The top prizes are announced on unsold tickets which are given to TMC leaders,” Adhikari told the media.
“TMC’s Birbhum district unit president Anubrata Mondal, his daughter and relatives of at least two other leaders received the first prize. The TMC government has stopped the state’s own lottery agencies to let the money launderers operate” Adhikari added.
Mondal was recently released on bail from Tihar jail in the cattle smuggling case.
The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) is already investigating whether Modal procured a prize-winning ticket in 2021 to launder proceeds from the cattle smuggling operation.
ED is running a parallel probe into the lottery company’s operations in Bengal after relatives of two other TMC leaders won the first prize of ₹1 crore in 2022.
A CBI officer said records showed that Mondal got the first price in a draw held on December 7, 2021. He was declared winner of ₹1 crore against ticket No 89H54045 priced at ₹6. However, when the lottery company published a newspaper advertisement in January 2022 with Mondal’s photograph, announcing that he had won the first prize, he issued a denial. “I am not aware of any such thing,” Mondal said in January 2022. He was arrested seven months later in the cattle smuggling case.
TMC spokesperson Kunal Ghosh dismissed Adhikari’s allegation.
“Anyone can buy a lottery ticket and win a prize. The leader of the opposition appears to be an expert in money laundering. He should go to ED and become a witness instead of making up stories,” Ghosh said.
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