Debjani Mukherjee, one of the main accused in the Saradha deposit collection case, was granted bail by Calcutta High Court on Saturday but will remain in jail as she, along with Saradha Group managing director Sudipta Sen, is being tried in a money laundering case at a court in Bhubaneswar.
Debjani along with Sudipta have been in jail since 2013. The other five accused — Kunal Ghosh, Rajat Majumdar, Madan Mitra, Srinjoy Bose and Sandhir Agarwal — have been granted bail over the last eight years.
Granting conditional bail to Debjani, the division bench of Acting Chief Justice Rajesh Bindal and Justice Arijit Banerjee asked her to furnish two sureties of Rs 1 lakh each and not step outside police jurisdiction of her residence. “She will have to deposit her passport to police and appear before any interrogation by the CBI officials,” the order added.
Debjani was arrested on April 22, 2013, by the SIT under the Money Circulation (Banning) Scheme Act and charged under sections 120B, 420, and 409 of the IPC. In May 2014, the Supreme Court handed over the case to the CBI.
Appearing for Debjani, advocate Jayanta Narayan Chatterjee told the high court that the CBI had filed a chargesheet against his client and her other co-accused in 2014. “My client was last interrogated by CBI in 2014 and for the last seven years she was never called by investigators for any further interrogation,” Chatterjee told the court that granted her bail on Saturday.