Kolkata: The West Bengal Police Thursday finally declared the total cash recovered from four trolley bags and a sack recovered after digging up the farmland owned by Dipankar Bhattacharya, the chairman of Trinamool Congress-controlled Baduria Municipality in North 24 Parganas district.
Bhattacharya was arrested on corruption charges at a hotel last Monday.
“The currencies, mainly in Rs 500 denominations, recovered from the trolley bags and sacks, were counted several times in the presence of a couple of bank officers. Finally, the total recovered amount ended at Rs 2.24 crore,” confirmed an official of the state police.
Incidentally, when Bhattacharya was arrested Monday at a hotel in Baduria, cash worth Rs 80 lakh was seized from his possession. This means the total cash recovered from him now stands at Rs 3.04 crore, said officials.
Bhattacharya was produced before a district court Tuesday, which remanded him to police custody.
Sources from the state police, aware of the development, said that during interrogation, Bhattacharya confessed that more cash had been hidden in his farmland.
Wednesday afternoon, the police took Bhattacharya to the farmland and, after digging up the land, the police recovered four trolley bags and one sack, all filled with cash.
According to police, allegations of corruption had been levelled against Bhattacharya for a long time.
Earlier, the police had recovered about 4,000 government tarpaulins from a local Trinamool Congress office in Baduria and a garden house owned by Bhattacharya.
Two separate complaints were filed against the chairman of the Baduria municipality at the police station, one by the CPI(M) and the other by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Acting on these complaints, Dipankar was arrested Monday night, and Rs 80 lakh in cash was recovered from him.
Now, questions have been raised about how Bhattacharya could possess such huge amounts of cash.
There are currently two corruption charges against him: the first is the receipt of commissions for allotments under ‘Banglar Bari’, the state’s own housing scheme introduced during the previous Trinamool Congress regime, and the second is the extortion of local people, especially traders in Baduria.
