Kolkata, Feb 20 (IANS) A special court on Monday granted CBI the permission to take three middlemen, arrested in connection with the multi-crore teachers’ recruitment scam in West Bengal, into custody till February 23.
Of these three linkmen, Tapas Mondal and Niladri Ghosh were arrested by the CBI sleuths on Sunday.
While, the third middleman and youth Trinamool Congress secretary Kuntal Ghosh was earlier arrested by the sleuths of Enforcement Directorate (ED), which is conducting a parallel probe in the matter.
Recently, CBI made an appeal to take him into custody from his current judicial custody.
Kuntal Ghosh was arrested on the basis of a statement of Tapas Mondal who is being interrogated parallelly by ED and CBI sleuths for last one-two months.
Mondal informed the investigating officials of ED that Ghosh collected Rs 19 crore from different candidates willing to pay money to get primary teachers’ jobs in different state-run schools in West Bengal.
On the other hand, Ghosh claimed to the investigating officials that he paid a major part of the money he received to the former West Bengal education minister and Trinamool Congress secretary general Partha Chatterjee, who was arrested by ED sleuths in July last year and is currently in judicial custody.
Meanwhile, Trinamool Congress has already started the process of relieving Kuntal Ghosh from his party portfolio as they did in case of Partha Chatterjee last year.
Although on Monday, the special court of CBI granted the central agency to take custody of the three middlemen, the judge of the court made a significant observation questioning the modus operandi of the agency’s probe in the matter.
“It seems that the CBI is up to preparing Paneer Butter Masala without having any stock of Paneer,” the judge of the special court observed.
This is not the first time that the CBI has faced wrath from special court of CBI as well as the judges of the Calcutta High Court.
In fact, on February 17, while hearing that the CBI sleuths have arrested prime middleman Chandan Mondal aka Ranjan, Justice Abhijit Gangopadhyay of the Calcutta High Court, following whose order the central agencies probe in the scam started, described the arrest as “very late step” by the CBI.
“What will happen with his arrest now? Nothing will happen. The investigation has been going on for the last seven to eight months. What result will his arrest now yield,” Justice Gangopadhyay questioned then.
–IANS
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