KOLKATA: After recovering cash worth Rs 21.9 crore six days ago, the Enforcement Directorate on Wednesday found Rs 27.9 crore and jewellery from another apartment in Belgharia near Kolkata owned by the model-cum-actor Arpita Mukherjee.
She is the close aide of arrested Trinamool heavyweight and Bengal minister Partha Chatterjee, who was arrested in an alleged teacher recruitment scam in state schools.
The central agency, which is probing into the money trail in the recruitment scam, brought currency counting machines to assess the volume of cash, which is suspected to be proceeds of crime of the alleged irregularities.
The investigators took more than 12 hours to count the currency notes.
The officials of the investigating agency broke open the door of the apartment on Wednesday morning and started the search operation.
“We found cash in the apartment owned by Arpita. The recovery is followed by leads provided by Arpita during her interrogation,” said an ED official.
The investigators are still ascertaining the value of the gold jewellery, believed to be in kgs, they added.
The money and gold were found five days after the agency seized more than Rs 21 crore in cash, besides jewellery and foreign exchange from another flat of Mukherjee in south Kolkata’s Tollygunge area, following which she was arrested.
In all, nearly Rs 50 crore in cash has been seized so far, officials said.
ED officials on Wednesday conducted coordinated raids at various properties at Rajdanga in south Kolkata and Belgharia in the northern fringes of the city.
During questioning, Mukherjee informed the ED about those properties, officials said.
ED sleuths had to break open a door to get into the two flats in Belgharia’s Rathtala locality as the keys to open them could not be spotted, they said.
Several “vital” documents were also found in the flats during a search, the official said.
Chatterjee, a powerful minister in Mamata Banerjee’s government and the secretary-general of Trinamool Congress, was arrested on Saturday after the cash was found at Mukherjee’s Tollygunge flat.
The CBI, as directed by the Calcutta High Court, is probing the alleged irregularities committed in the recruitment of Group-C and D staff as well as teachers in government-sponsored and aided schools on recommendations of the West Bengal School Service Commission (SSC).
The ED is tracking the money trail in the scam.
Chatterjee was the education minister when the alleged irregularities took place.
