Over the past two months, both central and state investigating agencies have made major cash recoveries in West Bengal.
Picture this.
· On July 23, the Enforcement Directorate seized Rs 21.2 crore in cash from one of the apartments of Arpita Mukherjee, a close aide of discredited Trinamool Congress leader Partha Chatterjee, from her upscale Diamond City apartment near Tollygunge in South Kolkata, while probing the School Service Commission recruitment irregularities in Bengal.
· On July 29, the ED recovered Rs 27.9 crore in cash and 6 kg gold from another apartment owned by Arpita Mukherjee from the Club Town Heights condominium in Belgharia in the northern fringes of Kolkata, while probing the same case.
· On September 4, the Bengal Crime Investigation Department (CID) raided the residence of a fish vendor, Jayprakash Saha, in Gazole, Malda and recovered Rs 1.4 crore in cash.
On September 10, the ED carried out search operations at the house of Amir Khan, son of businessman Nesar Ahmed Khan, in the Garden Reach area of south-west Kolkata, in connection with a case of online gaming fraud and recovered Rs 17.32 crore.
So the question is why the sudden cash hauls?
NOT SO SUDDEN
Historically speaking, Kolkata is no stranger to money laundering and shell company operations. In fact, Independent India’s first major financial scam took place in this very city back in 1957 when Haridas Mundhra, a city-based industrialist and stocks speculator, got the government-owned Life Insurance Corporation (LIC) to invest a sum of about Rs 1.27 crore in shares of six of his troubled companies.
Since then, the city has been home to a well-evolved ecosystem to bring back black money into the company books by means of shell company conduits, dummy directors and their operators, spurious current accounts in banks and a maze of transaction layers which render tax sleuths an uphill task of following the money and identifying their ultimate beneficiaries.
Crackdown ON THE ‘SHELL’ GAME
In the past few years, the Income Tax department has identified as many as 35,000 shell companies based out of Kolkata and launched prosecution against close to a hundred operators running illegal cash movement.
The well-established money laundering system in the city ensured that cash never had to be stocked. But fresh roadblocks and hindrances put up by government agencies over the past few years seem to have offered a setback to laundering operations.
“Cash hoarding is a new phenomenon in Kolkata. Earlier, there was no such necessity to hoard cash. Black money used to get pumped back into the system through the established system of shell company network. All these companies required was a trade license from the Kolkata Municipal Corporation, which enabled them to open current accounts in multiple banks and deposit cash in small amounts in those accounts. A maze of money transfer layers is then put into action by means of which the cash gets transferred back into the account of the beneficiary,” explained a senior IT department officer, on condition of anonymity.
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