Bengal school job case: CBI charge sheet against Sujay Bhadra adds section on tampering with evidence

The CBI, in a fresh charge sheet in West Bengal's multi-crore cash-for-school job case filed before a special Kolkata court on Friday, has added a section on punishment for tampering of evidence against prime accused Sujay Krishna Bhadra.

Sources aware of the development said that in the chargesheet Bhadra had been charged under Section 238 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), which was Section 201 in the erstwhile Indian Penal Code (IPC), which deals with “causing of disappearance of evidence”.

It is learnt that the CBI had charged Bhadra under the section dealing with punishment for tampering with evidence following specific clues secured by the investigating officials substantiating the direct involvement of the accused in destroying evidence, both in paper document format as well as digital data.

The central agency has also elaborated on its findings on the matter.

At the same time, sources added, Bhadra had also been accused under various sections of the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988 and the Information Technology Act, 2000.

Two other persons have been named in the charge sheet along with Bhadra. They are Santanu Bandopadhyay and Arun Hazra, both accused middlemen in the alleged scam.

Bhadra is currently out on bail after a division bench of the Calcutta High Court, last week, granted him interim bail in the CBI-registered case for medical treatment purposes. Earlier, another bench of the high court granted him bail in the case registered in the same matter by the Enforcement Directorate (ED), which is conducting a parallel probe in the school-job case.

However, despite granting bail, the division bench had imposed strict conditions on Bhadra on his movements and even meeting people.

Earlier this month, the CBI sleuths, after three consecutive failures, collected the voice samples of Bhadra and another accused, Kuntal Ghosh.

The trial process in the ED-registered case in the alleged scam has already started at a special Prevention of Money Laundering (PMLA) court in Kolkata.

The ED has named a total of 53 individuals as accused in their charge sheets in the matter, out of which 29 are individuals and the remaining 24 are corporate entities or trusts.

Heavyweight individuals named as accused are the former West Bengal Education Minister and Trinamool Congress Secretary General Partha Chatterjee, his close aide Arpita Mukherjee, and his son-in-law Kalyanmoy Bhattacharya, among others.

Babli Chatterjee Memorial Trust, a trust named after Chatterjee's deceased wife is also named in the ED charge sheet as an accused entity. It is alleged that the ill-proceeds were shown as donations to this particular trust and thus diverted.

A corporate entity where Bhadra was the erstwhile chief operating officer (COO) had also been named as an accused in the ED charge sheet.