A special court will decide on Tuesday whether state correctional services or prison department minister Chandranath Sinha will spend the Durga Puja behind bars or not.
The Enforcement Directorate (ED) had approached the special court seeking seven-days custody of the minister in connection with the teachers’ recruitment scam and the hearing was held on Saturday.
“We had seized Rs. 41 lakh from him and a mobile phone from him last year. We did not arrest him right away because the investigating officers felt that to build a fool-proof case against him more evidence was required. We need him in custody for seven days,” the prosecutor for the central probe agency told the court on Saturday morning.
After the hearing the special court judge reserved judgment until Tuesday.
“You have been saying a lot of things since yesterday. You all were present inside the court and you heard what transpired. I have full faith in the justice system,” the minister said after stepping out of the court premises on Saturday afternoon.
Sinha, a lawmaker from Bolpur and a minister in Mamata Banerjee’s cabinet for all three of her terms, first came under scrutiny in connection with the cash-for-jobs scam last year following the interrogation of another accused, Kuntal Ghosh, a Trinamool youth leader.
Last month, the central agency filed a chargesheet against Sinha – following the nod from Bengal Governor CV Ananda Bose – after allegedly tracking fictitious transactions worth Rs. 1.5 crore in two bank accounts held by the minister, in connection with the recruitment scam in the appointment of primary teachers in state-run schools.
The former state education minister Partha Chatterjee, who is already behind bars, is among the prime accused in the case, in which Sinha’s name has now been added.
The chargesheet against Sinha stated that he had allegedly received money from several aspirant teachers in exchange for promises of jobs.
The ED had named Sinha, who also holds the Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME) and textiles portfolios, in its sixth Supplementary Prosecution Complaint under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), 2002, on August 6, 2025.
According to the ED, Sinha’s name is allegedly linked to 159 candidates for primary teacher posts, after he was named by other accused Kuntal Ghosh, Prasanna Roy, and Tapas Mandal.
Before the special court on Saturday, the ED said the agency had asked the minister to submit documents required for the probe.
“The documents reached us a few hours after the chargesheet was filed against him. He is an influential person. Despite repeated summons, we could not get to talk to him. Yet he can produce critical documents within a day,” the ED said.
The agency claimed that after the chargesheet, when the minister surrendered and was subsequently granted bail, he could provide accounts for only Rs. 19 lakh of the Rs. 41 lakh seized from his home in March last year. Though the minister had claimed the money was from agriculture and real estate, he could not produce any supporting documents.
Citing Income Tax filings made by the minister, the ED said Sinha paid a fine of Rs. 90 lakh to the Income Tax department, but the source of the money remains unclear. The ED suspects the money recovered from the minister is part of the proceeds from the cash-for-jobs scam.
A team of ED investigators visited a market in Birbhum’s Murarai on Friday to inquire about the minister and his business links with the mandi.