KOLKATA, (IANS): The Enforcement Directorate (ED) has identified a new angle of
money laundering in the multi-crore cash-for-school job case in West Bengal
where a major part of the proceeds was diverted and shown as donations to
certain charitable trusts.
Sources aware of the development said that the ED has
mentioned this new style of money laundering in its last and fifth
supplementary charge sheet filed at a special court of the Prevention of Money
Laundering Act (PMLA) in Kolkata recently.
One such trust named in the fifth supplementary charge
sheet is the Babli Chatterjee Memorial Trust, named after the deceased wife of
former West Bengal Education Minister and Trinamool Congress Secretary General
Partha Chatterjee, who has been behind bars since his arrest by the ED in the
school-job case way back in July 2022.
In the previous charge sheet, Chatterjee’s son-in-law
Kalyanmoy Bhattacharya had also been shown as a co-accused of the former
Education Minister in this game of fund diversion under the masquerade of
donations.
Bhattacharya, who has settled abroad with his wife and
Chatterjee’s daughter Sohini Chatterjee Bhattacharya, was also questioned by
the ED as well as the officials of the Income Tax department in the matter.
However, his wife had not been shown as an accused in the
case though she was the Chairperson of the trust. Besides the trusts, the ED in
their subsequent charge sheets had named a number of shell corporate entities
linked to Chatterjee and his close associate Arpita Mukherjee.
Chatterjee and Mukherjee were arrested in July 2022,
after the ED officials seized huge amounts of cash and gold from her twin
residences then. Mukherjee is currently out on bail.
In the last and fifth charge sheet, the ED had also named
a corporate entity linked to another prime accused Sujay Krishna Bhadra and
claimed that his entity also acted as a major channel of fund diversion.
In the charge sheet, the ED has included 29 new names of
individuals and corporate entities
