The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Tuesday issued summons to Abhijit Bhattacharya, son-in-law of Partha Chatterjee, the prime accused in the West Bengal SSC recruitment scam. The move came after the ED investigators examined Chatterjee’s bank accounts in detail and found suspicious transactions worth more than Rs. 4 cr and found Bhattacharya one of the main beneficiaries.
Sources close to the ED investigations told The Daily Guardian that the investigators caught hold of Chatterjee’s bank account details after his interrogations in recent days. Bhattacharya has assets worth crores of rupees, said the sources. The central anti-money laundering agency has asked Chatterjee’s son-in-law to join the investigation sometime this week. Bhattacharya stays in the United States.
Speaking to The Daily Guardian, sources gave a blow-by-blow account of Mukherjee’s interrogation. During her interrogation by ED officials, Mukherjee is leaned to have disowned all the cache of monies and valuables that the central agency has seized after raids on various houses owned by her. “This money is not mine. I kept that money as Partha Chatterjee told me to do so. I was not allowed to enter the room where money was kept,” Mukherjee is said have told her interrogators when they asked her whose money was that.
When asked again where did the money seized from her houses come from and who kept the money there, Mukherjee told her interrogators, “Many times many people used to come and give these packets. Partha Chatterjee sometimes came and entered that room. I don’t know them. They are all related to Partha Chatterjee.” Mukherjee also told them about her association with Chatterjee, which began in 2009 during one of her modelling assignments.
The ED interrogators also questioned her about the properties she holds in joint ownership with her mentor Chatterjee. Apart from a massive haul of money and valuable assets in the form of gold and foreign currency worth crores, the ED has unearthed a huge bungalow measuring more than 7000 sq ft that Mukherjee co-owns with Chatterjee in Santiniketan. The bungalow was bought in 2012.
Meanwhile, the ED officials on Tuesday raided ‘Magic Touch’, a nail art shop on Tobin Road in Barahnagar area of Kolkata, owned by Chatterjee’s close aide Arpita Mukherjee. However, the ED officials remained tight-lipped about the raid, refusing to make any comment on their ongoing investigations.
Apart from Chatterjee’s son-in-law Bhattacharya, the ED is all set to summon seven persons for questioning, said sources. These include former SSC chairman Manik Bhattacharya, Secretary of West Bengal Board of Primary Education Kalyanmoy Ganguly, Minister of State for Education Paresh Adhikari, SSC Adviser S.P Sinha, personal secretary of Partha Chatterjee Sukanta Acharya, sister of Arpita Mukherjee and former owner of ‘APA’ house in Santiniketan.
The ED arrested Chatterjee and his close aide Mukherjee on 23 July when the central agency seized Rs. 21 cr in cash, jewellery and foreign currency after a raid on one of the houses Mukherjee owned. The central agency had conducted raids at 14 other places in various districts that day. The ED on Wednesday 27 July again seized Rs. 27.90 cr, along with 3 kg of gold bars and jewellery worth Rs. 4.31 cr, after a raid on Arpita’s house in Belgharia. The agency has so far seized about Rs. 50 cr and other valuables. A mysterious black diary was also recovered by ED officials on Friday.
In the meanwhile, the ED has sought help from writing experts to unravel the mystery of the black diary. The black diary and a pocket diary recovered from Mukherjee’s house during the raids have been sent to forensic experts. According to sources, the code words used in the diaries may contain all the important information. There are also two types of handwritings. Arpita and Partha have not divulged anything about them to their interrogators.
