A city court today granted five days' custody of the wife and son of multi-crore Saradha scam accused Sudipta Sen to the Enforcement Directorate while rejecting their bail prayer in connection with a case under the Money Laundering Act.
The chief judge of City Sessions Court Mohd Mumtaz Khan granted their custody to the ED till April 22 on a plea by the investigation agency for questioning them for locating the huge money that Sen had accumulated through Ponzi schemes.
The ED's counsel, Abhijit Bhadra, submitted before the court that thousands of crores of rupees had been collected from the market through the schemes.
This money was transferred to different accounts including those of his wife Piyali and son Shubhojit, apart from buying benami properties, Bhadra submitted before the court. He prayed for the custody of the two for interrogating them to find out where the huge amount of money had gone and about the benami properties.
Counsels for the accused prayed for their bail claiming that they were not involved in any kind of siphoning off of money and were wrongly implicated in the money laundering case. Hearing both the parties, the judge rejected their bail prayers and sent them to ED custody. Sudipta Sen was arrested from Kashmir in April last year and has been in the custody of West Bengal Police since then.
The duo, Piyali Sen and Shubhojit, were arrested by the sleuths of the ED after they were questioned for close to two hours with regard to the alleged dubious transactions that led to the Ponzi scam which has duped hundreds of investors across West Bengal, Odisha and Assam.
The agency has recently issued summons to numerous entities involved in the case even as it attached assets worth Rs 140 crore of individuals and firms on money laundering charges.
