Bengal school job case: ED suspects tainted candidates' list truncated to show lower crime proceeds

by IANS |

Kolkata, Sep 3 (IANS) The Enforcement Directorate (ED), probing the West Bengal School Service Commission (WBSSC) cash-for-job scam, suspects that the list of tainted candidates released by the Commission was "truncated" to show lower proceeds of crime.

The list published by the commission last week showed the total number of tainted candidates at just 1,806, a figure that surprised many who had been involved with the legal process associated with the cash-for-school-job case since the beginning.

Even the probe officials of ED suspect that the number of tainted candidates mentioned in the last list appears to be a little, compared to the huge proceeds in the entire case, including those already seized or confiscated by the central probe agency officials.

Sources said the probe officials also doubt the "truncated" list has been deliberately published with an ill-planned idea to establish a chain that "the lower the number of tainted candidates, the lower will be the proceeds of the alleged scam, and more curtailed will be the chain of beneficiaries".

However, the sources added, probably while planning this "truncated" list of tainted candidates, the planner have not kept one thing in mind, which is that from examining the money-trail in the entire scam, the ED officials have got several other ineligible names who paid huge sums for illegally getting jobs and whose names do not appear in the list published by the commission.

The investigating officials feel that ultimately, the intention with which the "truncated" list of tainted candidates was published last week will not be fulfilled.

Already legal brains like the former judge of the Calcutta High Court and the BJP Lok Sabha member from Tamluk constituency in East Midnapore district of West Bengal, Abhijit Gangopadhyay and the senior advocate and CPI(M) Rajya Sabha member, Bikas Ranjan Bhattacharya, have claimed that list published by the commission last week was "truncated", and many other names may surface in the coming days.

Both feel that the list of just 1,806 tainted candidates, which had already been made public by the commission last week, had been published to "conceal rather than reveal". Both have projected the actual number of tainted candidates to be around 6,000 or even slightly more than that.