The Enforcement Directorate (ED) has recovered Rs 27.9 crore in cash, besides a huge amount of gold jewellery from an apartment linked to Arpita Mukherjee, considered a close associate of arrested West Bengal Industry Minister Partha Chatterjee, officials said on Thursday morning.
The stacks of cash were recovered from the apartment in Belgharia on Wednesday, and after overnight counting, it amounted to Rs 27.90 crore, they said. The raid by the probe agency went on for 18 hours.
The probe agency officials left Arpita Mukherjee's home in the Belgharia area of Kolkata early this morning with 10 trunks of cash. Several "vital" documents were also found in the flats during a search, the official said.
Last week the ED had recovered Rs 21 crore in cash, besides jewellery and foreign exchange from another flat of Mukherjee in south Kolkata's Tollygunge area, following which she was arrested. Nearly Rs 50 crore has been seized from her so far.
Arpita Mukherjee later told the ED that the mountain of cash recovered from her home belonged to Bengal minister Partha Chatterjee. The money was to be infused in companies linked to her, she told the agency.
ED officials on Wednesday conducted coordinated raids at various properties at Rajdanga in south Kolkata and Belgharia in the northern fringes of the city.
During questioning, Mukherjee informed the ED about those properties, officials said.
ED sleuths had to break open a door to get into the two flats in Belgharia's Rathtala locality as the keys to open them could not be spotted, they said.
Chatterjee, a powerful minister in Mamata Banerjee's government and the secretary-general of Trinamool Congress, was arrested on Saturday after the cash was found at Mukherjee's Tollygunge flat.
The CBI, as directed by the Calcutta High Court, is probing the alleged irregularities committed in the recruitment of Group-C and D staff as well as teachers in government-sponsored and aided schools on recommendations of the West Bengal School Service Commission (SSC). The ED is tracking the money trail in the scam.
Chatterjee was produced before the court on Saturday and remanded to two-day ED custody, while Mukherjee was produced before the court on Sunday and remanded to one-day custody.
The ED prayed for 14 days' custody of Chatterjee claiming that he has been in state-run SSKM Hospital allegedly faking illness and thus the agency could not question him during the two-day remand granted by the CMM in-charge court on Saturday.
Chatterjee was the education minister when the alleged irregularities took place.
