The Enforcement Directorate claimed in a city court on Saturday that the sum of money it has so far been able to identify as having been embezzled in the Bengal ration distribution scam stands close to a staggering Rs 10,000 crore.
The agency made the claim during the remand hearing of Shankar Addhya, the former chairman of Bongaon Municipality and a close aide of arrested minister Jyotipriya Mullick, who was arrested in the wee hours of the day after a 17-hour marathon search operation at his residence and produced in court on Saturday.
But the jaw-dropping scam amount, which is likely to grow even further as the investigation proceeds, wasn’t the only startling claim that the agency made in court on Saturday. The ED submitted that Addhya was directly responsible for laundering money to the tune of Rs 20,000 crore using foreign currency trading and exchange through the border areas of the state and that about half of that amount came from the misappropriated ration distribution scam.
The agency also claimed in court that Addhya managed to smuggle out some Rs 2,500 crore, more than a tenth of the said amount, to Dubai by means of forex trade.
Addhya, on his part, claimed in court that he possessed the necessary NOC from the Reserve Bank of India to carry out forex trade and countered the ED claim by stating that merely Rs 8 lakh was found on him. But that claim clearly failed to impress the magistrate who remanded the accused in ED custody for 14 days, the maximum custody term possible for such arrests. Addhya will be produced in court next on January 20.
At a time when central investigating agencies, especially the ED, were focused on identifying laundered money trails using shell company operation modules, the new route of money transfer by means of forex trade certainly opened up a whole new dimension to the murky business of alleged corruption in the state.
Interestingly, the agency revealed in court that the names of both Addhya and Sahajahan Sheikh, the Trinamul Sandeshkhali strongman whose search operation triggered unprecedented violence on Friday, came in the ED’s radar when a handwritten letter from arrested minister Jyotipriya Mullick was intercepted by CRPF jawans and handed over to the agency.
Mullick, the agency claimed, wrote that letter in his cabin at the cardio emergency ward of SSKM Hospital in Calcutta where he currently remains admitted, and hand-delivered it to Priyadarshini, his daughter, during her visit on December 16. Prior to that, of course, Mullick had ensured vide a court order that the CCTV cameras in his cabin were deactivated on grounds of privacy and replaced by CRPF jawans on guard outside his cabin door.
The letter, the agency maintained in court, had a list of several names with specific amounts against each of them which the minister wanted transacted, either to be collected from or delivered to. Both Addhya and Sheikh’s names are featured on that list.
The letter was seized from Priyadarshini by the CRPF guards and subsequently handed over to the ED.
While exiting from court on Saturday, Addhya claimed he had no acquaintance with the minister’s daughter nor had any knowledge of the purported letter. “I have faith in the investigation process and soon the truth will be revealed before everyone,” Addhya said before boarding the agency vehicle which took him back to the Directorate’s office in CGO Complex, Salt Lake, where he would be grilled over the next two weeks.
Earlier, in a re-run of the Sandeshkhali violence earlier in the day, supporters of Addhya, led by women, also tried to stop agency officers from taking him away following his arrest late Friday night. Attempts were made to stop the ED vehicle and stones were hurled on it to prevent the leader from being taken into custody. The accompanying CRPF personnel resorted to baton-charge to bring the situation under control.
