Kolkata. Arpita Mukherjee, an accused in the teacher recruitment scam and close to former education minister Partha Chatterjee, on Monday put all the blame on Chatterjee.
After Arpita was produced before a special PMLA court here, her lawyer described Chatterjee as the mastermind of the case in which his client’s flats were used to store the proceeds of the scam.
Last year, the Enforcement Directorate had recovered several crores of rupees, gold biscuits and jewelery from two flats in the name of Arpita Mukherjee. On this recovery, he had said that Chatterjee was the owner of the seized money and gold.
He said, “There were other directors in the shell companies opened by Chatterjee besides my client. But it was these directors, including Kamal Singh Bhutoria, Mrinmoy Malakar and Manoj Jain, who were spared.
My client has an old mother, whom he has to take care of. In the counter argument, the ED’s counsel said that both Partha Chatterjee and Arpita Mukherjee were equally involved in the case.
ED’s lawyer said, ‘There are 31 life insurance policies in the name of the former minister, in which Arpita Mukherjee is nominated. If Arpita had nothing to do with the scam, why didn’t she open her mouth earlier.
And why was the police not informed about the huge amount of money stashed in the flats owned by them? If she was not a partner in the crime, why did she agree to be enrolled in so many insurance policies?’
He also produced before the court a list of properties jointly owned by Chatterjee and Arpita. Three properties are exclusively in Arpita’s name, while the rest are jointly owned by the two, he said.
