Kolkata: Enforcement Directorate teams arrived before the city was properly awake. On Friday morning the agency searched premises in Kolkata's Lake Town area and in Uttarpara, Hooghly district, in a ₹290 crore bank fraud and money laundering case.
The case starts in Jharkhand. A 66-megawatt power plant was to be set up by a private entity, Kohinoor Power Private Limited, and a loan of about ₹290 crore was taken from a consortium of banks for it. Investigators allege the money raised for construction was never spent on the plant, and that a substantial part was siphoned off and misappropriated through a web of shell companies.
Two chartered accountants are at the centre of the probe. One, Ashok Sarathi, is based in Kolkata. The other, Sudipta Ghosh, is in Uttarpara. Agency officials believe Sarathi played a key role in the alleged laundering, according to people familiar with the investigation.
At Uttarpara, a team accompanied by central armed police personnel cordoned off Ghosh's residence on Shibtala Street and later questioned him. "The investigators have arrived with the necessary authorisation, and I am cooperating with them. They are carrying out a probe," Ghosh told reporters, adding that "this has nothing to do with corruption". He did not elaborate on the nature of the investigation.
In Kolkata, a special team went to the Avani Oxford Phase 1 residential complex near VIP Road in Lake Town and searched Sarathi's flat.
Teams are examining computers and other digital devices, bank account records and financial documents found at the premises. The agency has not announced any arrests, and nobody has been named as an accused in a court filing made public so far.
The timing is notable for another reason: the searches come days after the agency's operations in the state drew political attention, with the ruling party and the Opposition trading charges over the use of central agencies. The ED has not linked Friday's case to any political party or individual beyond the two professionals under scrutiny.
What happens next turns on the documents. A ₹290 crore loan leaves a paper trail across sanction letters, drawdown records and the accounts of the companies that received the money. The agency's task is to establish where the funds went after they left the consortium's accounts, and whether the shell companies it has identified were controlled by the people now being questioned.