Kolkata, June 15: The Enforcement Directorate (ED) has finally sent a notice to four senior IAS officers, including the state’s finance secretary, in the much talked-about Metro Dairy scam in West Bengal, The Lucknow Journal has learnt.
They have been asked to appear before Salt Lake’s Eastern Regional Headquarters at ED’s CGO Complex on June 22.
The officials to whom the ED has sent the notice are Finance Secretary Hare Krishna Dwivedi, then Secretary of the Department of Zoological Development, Bhagwati Prasad, Gopalika Rajesh Singh and IAS Rajiv Kumar.
In this regard, the ruling party Trinamool Congress (TMC) has alleged that at the behest of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the ED has started this action so that the state government can be implicated in the assembly elections.
It is noteworthy that after the cabinet meeting chaired by Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, Metro Dairy with 43% share was sold to a private institute named Keventer Agro for only Rs 85 crore. The rest of the share of dairy was with Keventer Agro. Later, Keventer Agro then sold only 15% of the shares to a Singapore-based foreign company for Rs 170 crore.
Congress MP Adhir Ranjan Choudhary had raised a question about this and said that if the government had sold this stock by accurate assessment, there would have been an additional profit of Rs 500 crore.
The ED has filed a money laundering case and is investigating whether or not a foreign company was benefited. Transparency in the sale of dairy or not etc. is being investigated. Prior to this, the ED team has also gone to the state secretariat for questioning.
