E-Paper
ED raids four places in Bengal job scam case
A charge sheet against key suspect Sujaykrishna Bhadra, who is in judicial custody, was filed by the ED on July 28 at a Kolkata court
The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Monday raided four places in Kolkata and South 24 Parganas district to collect more evidence against Sujaykrishna Bhadra, a key suspect in the West Bengal school recruitment scam who was arrested on May 30, officials of the federal agency said.
A charge sheet against Bhadra, who is in judicial custody, was filed by the ED on July 28 at a Kolkata court.
Bhadra, who was questioned by both the ED and Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) before his arrest, told the media on March 23 that he worked for Abhishek Banerjee, national general secretary of the Trinamool Congress (TMC) and nephew of chief minister Mamata Banerjee.
“Abhishek Banerjee is my boss. I work for his company Leaps and Bounds. Since Banerjee cannot be touched by anyone, the agencies are targeting other people. It won’t help,” Bhadra said on March 23.
“The office of Leaps and Bounds at New Alipore in south Kolkata was raided on Monday. ED officers also raided an apartment at the city’s upmarket Lee Road area. Bhadra gave the expensive property as gift to his daughter and son-in-law,” an ED official said on condition of anonymity.
Escorted by central paramilitary force personnel, ED officers also went to a packaged drinking water plant in the Bishnupur area of South 24 Parganas and a property owned by Leaps and Bounds in the same district.
Agency officials said they examined many records and seized some documents.
The raids took place a day after Abhishek Banerjee returned to Kolkata from the US, where he had gone for the treatment of his left eye that suffered injury in a car accident in 2016.
No TMC leader commented on the ED raids.
Bhadra is suspected to be involved in huge monetary transactions made by three companies. It is suspected that money from the bribe-for-job scam was laundered through these companies, the ED told the court when the charge sheet was filed.
On May 20, CBI questioned Banerjee for almost 10 hours in connection with the recruitment scam. The interrogation was ordered by the Calcutta high court because his name was mentioned by Kuntal Ghosh, another suspect and a former TMC state general secretary.
Ghosh was arrested by ED on January 21. He was expelled from TMC two months after his arrest.
In May 2022, Calcutta high court judge Abhijit Gangopadhyay ordered the CBI to probe the appointment of non-teaching (Group C and D) and teaching staff by the West Bengal School Service Commission and West Bengal Board of Secondary Education between 2014 and 2021. The appointees allegedly paid bribes in the range of ₹5-15 lakh to get jobs after failing the selection tests.
The suspected involvement of TMC leaders surfaced when the ED arrested education minister Partha Chatterjee and his aide Arpita Mukherjee in July 2022.
