A day after he was arrested in connection with an alleged 2018 chit fund scam, Trinamool Congress (TMC) leader and Halishahar Municipality chairman Raju Sahani was on Saturday produced before a special CBI court in Asansol which sent him to the custody of the central investigating agency for five days, said CBI officials. He would be produced before the same court on September 8, they said.
Speaking with the media outside the court premises, Sahani claimed that Rs 80 lakh seized from his house was not his money. “I am not associated with all this (scam) in any way. You all will come to know about it soon,” Sahani told them.
The CBI raided Sahani’s Halishahar house on Friday afternoon and claimed to have seized various ‘deeds’, papers related to foreign investments and properties, Rs 80 lakh in cash and a country-made pistol. According to agency sources, the CBI told the court that Sahani was “one of the biggest beneficiaries of the ponzi firm”.
The CBI informed the court that they have, so far, found links of several properties — the estimated worth of which is Rs 2.75 crore — owned by Sahani, he has a bank account in Thailand and foreign investments abroad; besides these, the board of directors of the ponzi firm lent money to Sahani on several occasions, said agency sources.
The CBI suspects Sahani used the proceeds from the scam in acquiring properties, a notion that Sahani rebuffed.
CBI sources said that in 2014, for the first time, a complaint was registered against the chit fund company at the Kulti police station, alleging that the firm had withdrawn Rs 100 crore from the market.
According to agency sources, the sleuths claimed before the court that Sahani was “directly benefited by the chit fund company and he used to accept protection money from the firm’s directors”.
According to sources, CBI officials told the court that they suspected some influential people helped the chit fund company open its branches and now they “want to find out who they are and whether they have been benefited by the said firm”.
Sahani’s lawyer Pradip Paul, however, told the court that efforts were being made to “slander my client, who is a businessman and runs a political party. Besides, he is the chairman of a municipality. Thus, it is not unusual for him to have money.” “My client had borrowed money from one of his acquaintances and had returned the money. But how that person (lender) earned that money isn’t my client’s concern. If you have extra money/cash, you are answerable to the income tax department. So, why the CBI? My client is being framed,” said Paul.
“During the investigation, it was found that Rs. 20 lakh was transferred into the account of a firm owned by the accused (Sahani) from a Trust of which Soumyarup Bhowmik, named in the chit fund case FIR, is the chairman,” CBI said in a statement. The chairman of the Trust was running an illegal business of collecting deposits from the public without statutory permission from the regulatory authorities, said CBI sources, adding that Bhowmick has since been absconding.
In May 2014, the Supreme Court had directed the CBI to take over the investigations into all ponzi chit fund schemes in which lakhs of small depositors from West Bengal and Odisha were “duped”. Following this, a case was registered on October 30 in 2018.
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Earlier, CBI had arrested TMC Burdwan Municipality chairman Pranab Chatterjee in this connection. Chatterjee was, however, granted bail.
According to CBI sources, it is alleged that trustees of Sunmarg Welfare Organisation failed to repay the maturity amount to investors and disappeared after closing their branches. Reacting to the latest arrest by CBI, BJP national vice-president Dilip Ghosh said, “If cases are probed properly, half of the state ministers will be lodged in jail.”
