Bengal school job case: Accused Arpita Mukherjee admitted to hospital

Kolkata, Dec 5 (IANS) Arpita Mukherjee, a prime accused in the cash-for-school job case in West Bengal and a close associate of former state Education Minister and Trinamool Congress secretary general Partha Chatterjee, was hospitalised at a private hospital in Kolkata on Thursday.

Mukherjee was released on bail last month after a special court of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) approved that. Her bail was granted when she was already out on a five-day parole because of the demise of her mother.

She was hospitalised in the morning after complaining about a severe stomach infection.

To recall, Mukherjee was arrested in July 2022 by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) officials after huge cash and gold worth Rs 50 crore was recovered from her twin residences in the city. Partha Chatterjee was also arrested then.

Although Mukherjee was released on bail last month, Chatterjee is behind bars at Presidency Central Correctional Home in South Kolkata, with a division bench of the Supreme Court on Wednesday reserving the verdict on Chatterjee’s bail plea.

Since being released on bail last month, Mukherjee has been staying at her ancestral residence at Belgharia on the northern outskirts of Kolkata, where her mother died recently.

Although she was granted bail, the special court imposed a few conditions for granting the bail. She had to submit her passport and was barred from going out of Kolkata till further orders.

Recently, the ED submitted its fresh supplementary charge sheet in the school job case, where it included 29 new names of individual and corporate entities. The new names included a trust named after Partha Chatterjee’s deceased wife as well as some corporate entities having an interest in real estate, the private education sector and bicycle manufacturing among others.

The names of S. Basu Roy & Company, the outsourced entity responsible for the supply of optical mark recognition (OMR) sheets for the written examinations for school jobs and Partha Chatterjee’s son-in-law Kalyanmoy Bhattacharya were also named in the fresh charge sheet.

–IANS

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