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Bengal

'Madam Rose Valley' mystery deepens

Confirming that none other than the HR head of the Rose Valley Group, Seema Singh, is "Madam Rose Valley", Enforcement Directorate (ED) claimed that she is presently at large.

The search for 'Madam Rose Valley' had begun a few weeks ago, soon after the Kolkata Police found a folder of the same name in a computer in the chartered accountant's office on Mangoe Lane. It was initially considered that the folder was for the Rose Valley Group chief Gautam Kundu's estranged wife Subhra Kundu. Investigating officers started considering that ED's assistant director Manoj Kumar, who has been transferred to Customs on Wednesday, had introduced Subhra to the chartered accountant to help her send money outside the country through hawala.

Recently, the ED officers have come to know that the "Rose Valley" folder was opened for Gautam Kundu and the "Madam Rose Valley" was for Seema, who had come up as the second-in-command in the company within a few years of her joining in 2009. She had joined as a soft skill trainer and gradually became the HR head and also had easy access to the accounts department as well.

"Everyone in the company used to call her Madam and she is suspected to be the reason behind deterioration of the relation of Gautam and Subhra," said a senior ED officer adding that they had questioned her in December 2015. She had then managed to make the officers believe that she was close to the chief of the group just for professional purposes and nothing else. Moreover, she had claimed herself to be simple employee like all others in the group. The investigating officers came to know that apart from Kundu, she used to direct that to whom money had to be sent.

Seema, whom the ED officers know to be a resident of Baguiati area, is "not in the city at present". "As per our information, she has fled and is not in Kolkata now," the senior ED officer said. On the other hand, Subhra recently joined the jewellery section of Rose Valley Group as a designer consultant and she gets Rs 75,000 per month. But prior to joining the group as designer consultant, she didn't have money even to have food as her mother-in-law had refused to give her any money after Kundu's arrest.

Interestingly, both the ED and CBI officers want to question the proprietor of the chartered accountant firm on Mangoe Lane from where the computers were seized. Sources said that another investigating agency used to interrogate the person every morning and release him late at night. Thus, the central investigating agencies were not being able to question the person.

As per the claim of the Kolkata Police, there was a calculation of around Rs 14.69 crore in the "Madam Rose Valley" folder. But the interrogation of the person is quite crucial because he could only say that how much of the total amount was given by Seema and whether details of transaction of anybody else's money was also maintained in the same folder. Such firms usually maintain record of one person in someone else's folder to distract investigating agencies, the ED officer said.

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