Trinamool Rajya Sabha member Srinjoy Bose has been arrested in the Saradha chit fund scam
Rajya Sabha member Srinjoy Bose today became the third member of West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee's party to be arrested in the Saradha chit fund scam, in which lakhs of people were cheated out of their savings.
Mr Bose is the second MP of the ruling Trinamool Congress to be arrested in the multi-crore scam.
Another MP Kunal Ghosh was suspended by the party before he was arrested last November. Rajat Majumdar, a former police officer and Trinamool vice president, was arrested in August.
"The BJP is doing an action replay of what the previous government did. They cannot combat the Trinamool politically. So they let loose a discredited CBI," said Trinamool MP Derek O'Brien, targeting the CBI a day after the Supreme Court removed its director Ranjit Sinha from the 2G scam investigation.
Today's arrest signals growing trouble for the Trinamool; two of the four leaders that the Chief Minister had strongly defended at a party meeting last year are now in jail.
Srinjoy Bose and his family are closely associated with Mamata Banerjee. She had made Srinjoy's father Swapan Sadhan Bose a Rajya Sabha member. When his term finished in 2011, Srinjoy inherited that spot.
Mr Bose owns a Bengali newspaper. He allegedly had a deal to provide content to a TV channel owned by jailed Saradha Group chairman Sudipta Sen. Sources say investigators found massive, unaccounted flow of money from Saradha to Mr Bose.
The Saradha Group operated a Ponzi scheme offering huge returns of 40 per cent and more until it collapsed last year, leaving lakhs of small investors bankrupt in West Bengal and Odisha.
The CBI had also summoned two state ministers for questioning today but only one, Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, showed up. Transport minister Madan Mitra checked himself into a government hospital after four days at a private nursing home.
Last week, Kunal Ghosh allegedly attempted suicide by taking sleeping pills in jail. He had threatened in court that he would take his own life if the "real beneficiaries" of the chit fund scam were not arrested.