Justice Amrita Sinha of the high court on Tuesday asked the Enforcement Directorate (ED) why it was taking so long to complete its probe into the alleged involvement of Leaps and Bounds in irregularities in recruitments in government-aided schools in Bengal.
Leaps and Bounds is a company whose CEO is said to be Trinamul Congress national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee.
Justice Sinha was referring to the investigation into the alleged irregularities in the school recruitments when the name Leaps and Bounds came up.
“Why is your client taking so much time to complete the probe? The accused in the case, who are in jail, will go out but your probe will remain incomplete,” Justice Sinha told the ED’s lawyer, Dhiraj Trivedi.
Central investigation agencies suspect Leaps and Bounds is linked to the alleged corruption in the recruitment of teachers and other staff in schools.
However, till Tuesday, no evidence was furnished in the court to establish the link.
Advocate Trivedi told the judge: “Please consider our problem. We are facing litigations at every step after the attachment of some of the properties of the company (Leaps and Bounds). The process of attaching the properties is going on. Please give us time.”
The lawyer also said much time had been wasted because of the delay in collecting the voice sample of “one of the arrested accused (Sujay Krishna Bhadra)”.
Bhadra was made to give his voice sample to the ED last month following an order issued by the single-judge bench of Justice Sinha.
Bhadra later moved an appeal against Justice Sinha’s order before the division bench of Justice Soumen Sen and Justice Uday Kumar.
The division bench ordered a stay on the use of Bhadra’s voice sample as evidence in the case related to the allegedly illegal recruitments. It then referred the matter to the court of Justice Tirthankar Ghosh, who was hearing Bhadra’s bail petition.
On Tuesday, Justice Sinha scheduled the next hearing of the case related to the ED’s probe into Leaps and Bounds for March. The ED and the CBI will have to file progress reports of their investigations that day.