Complaint filed with ED against BJP MP Locket Chatterjee

Kolkata: A delegation of Trinamool Congress members submitted a complaint on Friday to the office of the Enforcement Directorate (ED), demanding action against BJP MP Locket Chatterjee who was allegedly a beneficiary in the Rose Valley scam.

The action by the TMC comes in the wake of a complaint registered against its party MP Nusrat Jahan for alleged fraud. On Friday morning, a TMC councillor of Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation, Tulsi Sinha Roy went to the ED office in the city along with her lawyers to lodge a complaint against the BJP MP.

Roy told the media that the ED is now involved in the probe of several matters and mostly investigating members of opposition parties in all states. “In Bengal, we want an unbiased probe. Locket Chatterjee is a beneficiary in the Rose Valley scam. We want the ED to probe the matter without any bias. Hence, today (Friday) morning we came to their office to lodge a complaint, demanding that the BJP MP should be probed in this matter.”

In the complaint to the ED, the Trinamool Congress councillor demanded that the central agency should investigate the issue of Chatterjee’s assets which are disproportionate to her income.

She added that if required, all cooperation will be extended to the central probe agency. Justifying her move, Roy said since the ED is investigating the Rose Valley case, Chatterjee should also be probed and should not be kept outside the investigation if at all the central agency has the intention to conduct a fair probe.

However, many are viewing this as a move of retribution after BJP leader Shankudeb Panda recently took some senior citizens to the ED office to help them register a complaint against Nusrat.

A group of senior citizens, mostly retired employees of a nationalised bank, complained to the ED on Monday that the company, where Nusrat was once a director, had duped them of around Rs 24 crore.

The Rose Valley financial scandal or Rose Valley Chit Fund Scam was a multi-crore financial scam and alleged political scandal involving around Rs 17,000 crore caused by the collapse of a ponzi scheme run by Rose Valley Group in West Bengal. In May, this year, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) filed a supplementary charge-sheet in the Rose Valley chit scam case under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA). Charges were also filed for the first time against Subhra Kundu, wife of Gautam Kundu, the arrested owner of Rose Valley.

The investigations are being carried out in West Bengal and Odisha. In 2014, the Supreme Court asked the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to probe the scam orchestrated by the West Bengal-based Rose Valley Group and also the suspected role of influential people in money laundering. The ED launched a parallel probe into the case. Two TMC Lok Sabha members — Sudip Bandyopadhyay and Tapas Pal — were arrested by the CBI in 2017. Bandyopadhyay got bail after 136 days but Pal, who was also a popular actor in Bengali cinema, was in judicial custody for around three years. He died in 2020, months after being granted bail.