The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Monday raided the house of a BJP MLA in connection with the probe into the alleged irregularities in municipal recruitments in West Bengal.
On the second day of an ongoing raid, CBI officials searched the houses of BJP MLA Partha Sarathi Chatterjee in Ranaghat and eight other places in Nadia, Uluberia and Diamond Harbour. Chatterjee served as a chairperson of Ranaghat municipality for 25 years as a Trinamool Congress functionary before crossing over the BJP camp.
A CBI team reached his residence at 9:45 am and the search and seizure continued for more than six hours. Following the raid, the MLA said he was “confident” there was no irregularities in recruitment during the time when he was Chairman of Ranaghat Municipality but admitted that he knew Ayan Sheel, the owner of a private company ABS Infozone which was tasked to handle recruitments in almost 60 municipalities across West Bengal.
Trinamool Congress spokesperson Kunal Ghosh said the raid was an eyewash to portray that the CBI probe was impartial, and not targeting his party. BJP’s spokesperson Shamik Bhattacharya said, “Trinamool always says that the CBI is being used to carry out vendetta attacks on them. The raid on the BJP MLA proves that the CBI is truly impartial.” Another CBI team raided the residence of former mayor Meera Haldar of Diamond Harbour, TMC’s national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee’s constituency. CBI officials reached Haldar’s house in Ward no. 10 of Diamond Harbor municipality around 10 am.
In 2016, there were allegations of widespread corruption in Diamond Harbour municipal council appointments. The investigating agency has learned that appointments were made through a private company owned by Ayan Sheel, who has already been arrested in the recruitment corruption case. Meera was the chairperson of the municipality at that time. The CBI team searched for appointment-related documents.
The CBI on Sunday searched 12 premises across Kolkata, Kanchrapara, Barrackpore, Halisahar, Dumdum, North Dum Dum, Krishnanagar, Taki, Kamarhati, Chetla, Bhawanipur. These included the residences of senior TMC leader and State Minister Firhad Hakim and his party MLA Madan Mitra.
The case was registered against the director of a private company and unknown others in compliance with the orders of the Calcutta High Court on 21 April. It was alleged that all contracts pertaining to various municipalities, district primary school councils, etc, for the recruitment of Group C and Group D employees were given to the company alone. The firm was entrusted with all tasks like setting up question papers, printing and scanning OMR sheets and preparing the final merit list.
