ED raids Shuvaprasanna’s office

KOLKATA: Artist and Mamata loyalist Shuvaprasanna could not satisfy the Enforcement Directorate (ED) with the additional papers his confidential assistant went to submit to the agency’s office on Tuesday. Instead, ED officials took him along to conduct raids at Shuvaprasanna’s Devkripa Vyapaar Pvt Ltd office at Salt Lake.
ED officials wanted to know from the artist if he had the power of attorney of the other 12 shareholders who had invested in the television channel to sell the company’s shares to Saradha boss Sudipta Sen and the realty wing Saradha Construction Company at one go on January 2, 2012.They also wanted the artist to show the papers of the flat he bought in Mumbai with loans taken from Devkripa.
Investigators tracing the money trail are not convinced with Shuvaprasanna’s reply about the price at which the company sold its shares to Sen and Saradha Construction Company.
According to the report submitted to the Supreme Court by the high court-appointed Special Investigating Team (SIT), the shares were sold at a premium Rs 14 crore, of which the artist got only Rs 50 lakh. Whatever the fact, the shares were sold at
a rate higher than their initial value, indicating that the company booked profits.
However, the amount Shuvaprasanna and his wife Shipra got by selling their 5 lakh shares is equal to their initial value. The question now is, why did Shuvaprasanna and his wife sell the shares at the initial price when the company sold all the shares at a higher rate. Going by what the SIT submitted to the Supreme Court, the share value of Devkripa Vyapaar Pvt Ltd kept rising though the television channel it floated didn’t see the light of day.
What has struck the ED officials is the fact that Shuvaprasanna and his daughter Jonaki Bhattacharya continued to be directors even after Sen bought all the shares in the new dispensation along with Sen and Debjani Mukherjee. The annual return filed to the Registrar of Companies on September 28, 2012, shows Shuvaprasanna and his daughter as directors even after the transfer of shares to Saradha Group. The artist told the CBI that they wrote to the Saradha boss to relieve them from the board of directors, which has not been reflected in the annual return.
According to sources, Shuvaprasanna might have continued on the board because he didn’t get the entire amount promised. On paper, the company had a capital of Rs 3.5 crore, divided into 35 lakh shares of Rs 10 each. The question then is, at what price were the shares sold?
The ED team that raided the Salt Lake office of Devkripa Vyapaar Pvt Ltd has reasons to believe that the other shareholders invested in the company at the behest of a realtor close to Shuvaprasanna. Investigators may summon the artist yet again to clarify the grey areas in the selling of shares.