Bengal school job case: CBI gets call records establishing Partha Chatterjee’s involvement

Kolkata, Jan 13 (IANS) The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in its third and last supplementary charge sheet on the cash-for-school job case in West Bengal filed at a special court in Kolkata has provided details of how the call details of the mobile phone of a middleman have established the involvement of the former state Education Minister and Trinamool Congress secretary general, Partha Chatterjee, in the alleged scam.

Sources said the CBI in the charge sheet has also mentioned a bank account in the name of the said middleman, Santu Gangopadhyay, which was reportedly used for the transfer of proceeds of the alleged scam.

A total of Rs 3.08 crore was the last balance of the said bank account held with the branch of a private bank located at Sakuntala Park area in the southern outskirts of Kolkata.

Sources said that Gangopadhyay, an extremely close confidant of Chatterjee and an erstwhile small-time real estate promoter, witnessed a sudden spurt in financial fortune since 2014, the year when Chatterjee became the state education minister.

Since that point of time, Gangopadhyay’s real estate business, sources added, became a major medium of diversion of the ill-gotten proceeds in the school job case with the proceeds being shown as investments in the real estate business.

Earlier this month, CBI had also received permission from the office of West Bengal Governor C.V. Ananda Bose to file the charge sheet against Chatterjee, a process which is mandatory for a court to officially accept the charge sheet filed against any member of the state Assembly.

With the event of getting the nod for filing the charge sheet against Chatterjee, docks are cleared to begin the process of framing charges against him in the CBI-registered case of the alleged school job scam.

Chatterjee was first arrested in July 2022 by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) after huge cash and gold were recovered from the twin residences of his close aide Arpita Mukherjee. Since then, Chatterjee has been behind bars at Presidency Central Correctional Home in South Kolkata, though Mukherjee was released on conditional bail recently.

Recently, CBI had also shown him arrested in the same school job case thus making his release from jail even more uncertain.

Meanwhile, the total confiscation amount by the Enforcement Directorate has reached Rs 239.26 crore so far in the cash-for-school-job case in West Bengal.

–IANS

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