Arrested Trinamool Congress MLA Jiban Krishna Saha's aunt, Maya Saha, appeared before a team of interrogators of the Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Thursday in connection with the agency's probe into alleged irregularities in appointments in state-aided schools in Bengal.
The 48-year-old legislator had been rounded up three days ago. Maya, a Trinamool councillor in Birbhum's Sainthia, arrived with her husband in response to a summons the ED had sent on August 25 while conducting a search operation at her house.
While the search was being carried on in Sainthia, a separate team had arrested her nephew, Jiban, from his house in Burwan, Murshidabad, following a search and seizure operation lasting at least five hours.
Jiban's father, Biswanath, has alleged that there were illegal money transactions between his son and Maya.
"I am not involved in any irregularities. Let it be clear that no ill-gotten money from any irregularities reached my account," Maya said while entering the ED office at the CGO Complex in Salt Lake on Thursday morning. "The allegations that have been labelled are baseless. My properties have been made from the income of my husband, who has been running a business for the past 40 years."
Senior ED officials said they wanted to know from Maya certain things about the alleged parking of Jiban's money in several properties and verify the information with the arrested MLA.
"The information culled from her mobile phone records and her statements would be tallied, and we will want her to clarify about the purchases recently made and their source of income," a senior ED officer said.
Jiban had thrown his two mobile phones in a swamp on Monday morning when an ED team reached his house before trying to escape by scaling the boundary wall. An ED officer recovered the mobile phones from the muck, and sources said they had been sent for forensic examination.
Following his arrest, ED told a court in Calcutta that Jiban allegedly collected ₹46 lakh from eight candidates, who wrote the selection test in 2016. The amounts ranged between ₹1 lakh and ₹12.5 lakh.
The investigations revealed that out of this amount, ₹26 lakh was transferred to his wife's bank account in September and December 2020, the ED claimed.
Jiban has denied the charges. His counsel told the court that the MLA has been cooperating with the ED and has responded to the summons that the agency sent three times.