ED claims Manik’s wife updated KYC of dead a/c-holder

Kolkata: The Enforcement Directorate, probing the money trail in the cash-for-jobs scam, made a startling claim about bank accounts while producing former West Bengal Board of Primary Education chairman Manik Bhattacharya before the Alipore PMLA court on Friday.
ED lawyer Bhaskar Prasad Banerjee submitted that Manik’s wife Satarupa had updated the KYC documents of a dead man, Mrityunjay Chatterjee, with whom she has a joint bank account, three years after his death on January 30, 2016.The lawyer submitted that Satarupa had signed documents on Chatterjee’s behalf in 2019, claiming that the person was “out of station”.
“Chatterjee, the first account holder of the joint account, died in 2016. But she didn’t inform the bank even after three years in order to camouflage the proceeds of crime. Investigation has revealed that Manik Bhattacharya was the introducer of the said account,” Banerjee submitted.
Manik’s lawyer Sanjay Dasgupta pleaded that the said account was opened in 1981 and Chatterjee was Satarupa’s relative. “A joint account does not become inoperative after the death of one of the account holders. The amount of transaction being quoted by the ED is also unsubstantiated,” he argued.
The court remanded Manik in judicial custody till November 10. The judge allowed both ED and CBI to question him in custody.
The ED alleged that apart from other transactions, fixed deposits worth Rs 2 crore was linked to the account. The agency also claimed that then education minister Partha Chatterjee was aware that Manik was collecting money through his son’s company Educlasses Online.
“The WhatsApp chats retrieved from Partha’s mobile phone indicate that he was aware of such activities. Yet, he didn’t take any concrete step to stop that. It shows that Partha and Manik were in connivance and turned a blind eye to corruption,” Banerjee said in court.
In another case, the production of accused persons in the jobs-for-cash scam, including S P Sinha, Subires Bhattacharyya and Kalyanmay Gangopadhyay, was postponed till Monday after the accused persons were produced virtually. Special PMLA judge Bidyut Kumar Roy asked the jail authority to produce them physically on that date.