The CBI Sunday searched six places in Kolkata and North 24 Parganas, including the residences of Trinamool legislator Subodh Adhikari and his brother and councillor Kamal Adhikari, in connection with an alleged chit fund scam 2018 in West Bengal, said officials.
According to CBI sources, the teams also interrogated Bijpur MLA Subodh Adhikari and his family members for more than five hours. The agency has arrested Raju Sahani, Trinamool Congress leader and the chairman of the Halishahar municipality, in connection with its probe into the chit fund scam.
Raju Sahani, who was produced in an Asansol court Saturday, has claimed that the money recovered from his house Friday doesn’t belong to him. The court remanded him to CBI’s custody for five days of police custody. He will be produced in the same CBI court on September 8.
The Central Bureau of Investigation has claimed that Sahani, as a member of the board of Sanmarg Cooperative, a Burdwan-based chit fund firm, was one of the biggest beneficiaries of the ponzi scam. The agency has said, during the investigation, it found that an amount of approximately Rs. 20 lakh was allegedly transferred into the account of a firm owned by Sahani from a group company of the trust.
It has alleged that this money was invested in the trust by poor investors. It further alleged that the chairman of the trust was running an illegal business of collecting deposits from people without the statutory permission of the regulatory authorities. The chairman is absconding.
According to the CBI, Sahani had harboured the chairman of the trust in his house during 2018-19 and facilitated him to open a bank account in 2018 which he later used to deposit the sale proceeds of a trust property and then routed the sale proceeds of approximately Rs. 75 lakh to Sahani’s account.
This was allegedly done to facilitate the chairman to misappropriate the sale proceeds from the property which was bought with the money people invested in the trust.
