Kolkata: West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Friday suffered a major setback with the arrest by CBI of her Cabinet colleague Madan Mitra in the multi-crore Saradha scam. An enraged Mamata defended Mitra and lashed out at the Centre calling the arrest as "unconstitutional, illegal and vendetta politics".
This is for the first time that a Cabinet Minister in the Mamata government has been arrested by the CBI in the scam. So far, the arrested persons included TMC members of Parliament Kunal Ghosh and Srinjoy Bose.
Reacting sharply to the development, Mamata alleged that the BJP leaders were involved in the Saradha scam and that the arrests being made by the CBI in the issue were bullying tactics of the Centre. She accused the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of destroying the federal structure of the Constitution. "It is illegal to arrest a Cabinet minister without informing the CM," said the enraged leader.
Earlier, the CBI on Friday evening arrested Mitra after interrogating him for nearly five hours over the post he was holding in Saradha Group of Companies. The minister appeared before the CBI at the agency's office at the Salt Lake CGO complex on Friday morning in connection with the case. He has been arrested on charges of criminal conspiracy, cheating, misappropriation and for deriving undue financial benefits from the Saradha Group.
He was summoned by the CBI in November 2014 but he checked into a government hospital instead barely hours before his scheduled appearance before the investigating agency, presumably to evade the grilling session. The CBI also arrested Naresh Balodia, legal advisor to Sudipto Sen and Saradha Group on charges of criminal conspiracy, cheating and diversion of funds in the same case. Balodia had drafted the letter which Sudipto Sen had sent to the investigative agency, a CBI spokesman said. Mitra is said to be a close aide of West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee. He is the third senior TMC leader to be arrested in the case. The other two are former TMC MP Kunal Ghosh and Rajya Sabha MP Srinjoy Bose.
Ghosh's judicial custody came to an end on Friday. He had accused Mamata Banerjee of being the biggest beneficiary of the scam.
Ghosh has also accused Mitra of being involved in the scam. Mitra won the Bishnupur Assembly seat of South 24 Parganas district in the 2009 bypolls. He represented the constituency perched in the southern fringes of Kolkata till 2011.
The Saradha Group, incidentally, started its operations from Bishnupur and, during Mitra's time, was in full flourish. Mitra lectured at the group's investors' meet and ushered heaps of praises on the "good work the company was doing".
He was, allegedly, also the president of the group's employees' association. His pictures with the discredited chairman of the Group, Sudipta Sen, was once seen proudly hung at the Saradha offices before they were quickly removed after the company collapsed in April, 2013.
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