KOLKATA: Satarupa Bhattacharya, wife of former West Bengal Primary Education Board chairman MLA Manik Bhattacharya was granted bail by the Calcutta High Court on Monday.
It is the first bail granted to any accused in the SSC jobs for cash probe.
Bhattacharya, who was taken into custody along with her son Souvik, after the duo surrendered at the special PMLA court, was granted a conditional bail on a bond of Rs 1 lakh by the court of Justice Tirthankar Ghosh.
Raising a question about the complicity of Manik Bhattacharya with his wife, Justice Ghosh said that why was not she arrested at the beginning if there was complicity? He ordered that there is not enough reason at the moment to keep her in custody now.
Bhattacharya’s lawyer Jishnu Saha alleged that she was questioned only once on November 24 last year, much before she was taken into custody. “She was not questioned by the central investigating agency after that,” Saha said.
ED’s lawyer Phiroze Edulji argued that Satarupa Bhattacharya was not merely a housemaker, but also a party to the crime. “She had made foreign tours using the proceeds of crime. She was intricately involved in the offence like the lady Macbeth,” he said. He also argued that Satarupa had endorsed the KYC documents of a joint account holder--Marityunjay Chatterjee, three years after his death, hiding the facts from the bank.
