The appeal against the Calcutta High Court’s decision authorizing the Enforcement Directorate (ED) and Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to investigate Abhishek Banerjee in connection with the West Bengal teacher recruitment scam was denied by the Supreme Court on Monday.
We won’t meddle with the contested order because doing so would impede the investigation. The panel of Chief Justice DY Chandrachud and Justice PS Narasimha stated that the petitioner could use the legal remedies that are available.
Banerjee requested the recall of the order after Justice Abhijit Gangopadhyay of the Calcutta High Court had permitted the ED and CBI investigation. His appeal was rejected on May 18 by Justice Amrita Sinha and a single judge panel. The judge also fined Kuntal Ghosh, who is being held by the CBI on suspicion of being involved in the scam, and Banerjee, a TMC lawmaker from Diamond Harbour, Rs 25 lakh each for wasting the court’s time. Later, on May 26, the supreme court put a hold on the punishment’s imposition.
Abhishek was mentioned in a complaint made by local businessman Kunal Ghosh, a defendant in the employment scam case, who claimed that he had been under pressure from central authorities to implicate the TMC leader in the case. Abhishek has consistently criticized the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for abusing the institutions under its command.
As part of their probe into the primary school jobs scam, the Central Bureau of probe (CBI) had officers question the TMC MP for more than nine hours on May 20 at their office in Kolkata.
A few days after objecting to Justice Gangopadhyay’s appearance on a TV news station to discuss the simmering scandal, the top court requested the Acting Chief Justice of the Calcutta High Court to reassign the teacher recruitment fraud case to another judge on April 28.