The Central Bureau of Investigation, which is probing the high-profile Saradha scam case in West Bengal, stepped up its efforts to trace former Kolkata police commissioner Rajeev Kumar on Thursday by issuing a fresh notice to him. The agency has asked Kumar to appear before it on September 20, while conducting searches for him at various locations in Kolkata.
The CBI also moved a city court seeking an arrest warrant against Kumar.
The agency claimed that the senior IPS officer has failed to appear before it for assisting in the chit fund scam probe despite notices being sent to him on multiple occasions.
CBI lawyers said in the court of Additional Chief Judicial Magistrate (ACJM), Alipore, Subrata Mukherjee that Kumar was not cooperating with the agency in the probe.
The central agency stepped up its activities in Kolkata a day after Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee met Prime Minister Narendra Modi at his residence in Delhi on Wednesday. The meeting had created ripples in political circles as it came at a time when several leaders of her Trinamool Congress are in the CBI scanner in connection with the chit fund scam.
The fact that Mamata had been a staunch critic of Modi and the BJP government and that she had stayed away even from the Niti Aayog meeting also fueled speculations.
The agency has shot off a fresh letter to the West Bengal Director General of Police, seeking the phone number of Kumar. In reply to an earlier letter from the CBI, the DGP had said that Kumar had intimated him through his lawyer that he was on leave till September 25.
Kumar, a 1989-batch officer, was part of a special investigation team (SIT) set up by the West Bengal government to investigate the scam before the Supreme Court handed over the case to the CBI in 2014, along with other chit fund cases.
The Saradha group of companies had allegedly duped lakhs of people to the tune of Rs 2,500 crore promising higher rates of return on their investments.
