Justice Tirthankar Ghosh of Calcutta High Court on Monday issued an interim order restraining, till further order, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) or any other investigating agency from taking any action against Trinamul Congress leader Abhishek Banerjee on the basis of the contents of 16 files that were allegedly seized from the office of Leaps and Bounds.
The judge also directed the Calcutta Forensic Science Laboratory to produce the printouts of the 16 downloaded files before the court in a sealed cover on Tuesday.
The case will be heard again on Wednesday.
Banerjee is a former CEO of the company. The ED has claimed that he continues to be the CEO of Leaps and Bounds.
In a press release, it claimed that Sujay Bhadra, one of the arrested accused and chief operation officer of Leaps and Bounds, had admitted during interrogation that the money collected from the job scam was deposited in the company’s accounts.
The files were allegedly seized during a raid in connection with the probe into alleged corruption in school recruitments.
The investigating agency had produced soft copies of the seized files before the court on Saturday.
But the judge had ordered that the copies would have to be downloaded in the presence of an ED officer and also an officer of the cyber crime department of Calcutta police.
The judge had also ordered that the downloaded copies of the files would have to produced before the court on Monday.
In response to Saturday’s order by Justice Ghosh, ED officer Mithilesh Mishra informed the court on Monday that files were taken to the Calcutta Forensic Science Laboratory around 11.30am but there was not enough time to take printouts after the files had been downloaded.
The ED officer alleged that the police did not cooperate with him.
After hearing Mishra, the judge issued the order and fixed the matter for hearing on Wednesday.
The orders were delivered while hearing a petition by Banerjee seeking quashing of proceedings drawn against him by the ED and the CBI trying to implicate him in the recruitments case.
The judge made it clear on Monday that since another judge of the court was hearing the school recruitment case, he would only hear Banerjee’s plea for quashing of proceedings against him.