Bengal minister aide held hours after his arrest. '21 cr was found at her home'

The Enforcement Directorate on Saturday arrested Arpita Mukherjee, the close aide of West Bengal cabinet minister Partha Chatterjee.

This comes a day after the ED said it recovered cash worth over ₹21 crore from her residence. Earlier in the day, the probe agency had detained Mukherjee a day after cash haul was seized from her residence in Kolkata.

Bengal minister Partha Chatterjee has been sent to ED custody for two days by a Kolkata court. The minister was arrested after being questioned for nearly 26 hours by the central agency.

The TMC leader, who was the state education minister when the alleged irregularities in teacher recruitments took place, will be produced before a special ED court on Monday.

On Friday, the ED officials had raided Mukherjee's apartment in a posh south Kolkata housing campus where she lives on the first floor. The ED said heaps of money with denominations of ₹500 and ₹2000 and bundles of cash in sealed envelopes were recovered from there. The ED officials said Mukherjee was not cooperating in the interrogation, and was either keeping silent or avoiding questions asked to her on the source of money.

The Calcutta high court had ordered the Central Bureau of Investigation to investigate the alleged irregularities in the recruitment of hundreds of teachers and non-teaching staff in both secondary and primary schools of the West Bengal government.

In June, the ED lodged two FIRs to unearth the money trail allegedly involved in the case. It is suspected that transactions worth crores of rupees were made for the appointment of teachers recruited through the staff selection commission (SSC) and the teacher eligibility test.