Trinamool Congress supremo Mamata Banerjee has awarded ministerial berths to four of her party colleagues who were allegedly caught in the purported Narada sting operation.
The 42 ministers in the Banerjee cabinet who will be sworn in on Friday will include Firhad Hakim, Subrata Mukherjee, Sovon Chatterjee and Suvendu Adhikari - four of the over a dozen party big shots who were purportedly shown in the sting operation taking wads of currency notes in return for doling out favours to a fictitious company.
While Hakim and Mukherjee were retained in the cabinet, Kolkata Mayor Chatterjee and Adhikari, a Lok Sabha member who won the assembly polls from Nandigram, are among the new faces in the new council of ministers.
Barring former state transport minister Madan Mitra, the five MLAs caught in the sting, emerged unscathed in the assembly polls. Jailed in the multi-crore rupee Saradha chit fund scam, Mitra is one of most high profile causalities for the Trinamool which swept the assembly polls winning 211 of the 294 seats.
Iqbal Ahmed, who retained Khanakool constituency, is the only "stung" MLA not to have found a ministerial berth.
--IANS
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