The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Thursday filed a petition before Calcutta High Court seeking a restraint order on Kolkata police from taking any coercive action against its officers for downloading 16 files from the office of Leaps and Bounds, a company whose CEO, the ED has said, is Trinamul Congress general secretary Abhishek Banerjee.
The central agency first submitted a prayer before Justice Amrita Sinha of Calcutta High Court on Thursday seeking permission to file a petition requesting the restraint order.
The counsel for the directorate filed the petition after the judge allowed the prayer.
The ED had conducted an 18-hour raid on the Leaps and Bounds office and downloaded 16 files from the computers there last month.
The “seizure” of the files prompted the company to file a case of illegal seizure against officers of the central agency who were part of the raid.
Based on that complaint, the cyber police station of Kolkata police had drawn up a case against the ED officers and initiated an investigation. Several ED officers have been summoned in connection with this case.
Moving the petition, the ED counsel claimed that the officers of the central agency were being repeatedly summoned for interrogation on charges of “collecting the
files from the office without prior intimation and without obtaining approval”.
The counsel also claimed that his client — the Enforcement Directorate — was apprehending harassment, including the arrest of its officers who are related to this case.
The lawyer said that for the sake of “an uninterrupted probe” into the alleged irregularities in recruitment in government-aided schools in Bengal, the high court should provide “protection” to the central agency’s officers.
The ED has been probing the alleged recruitment irregularities in which several senior officials of the state education department, including former minister Partha Chatterjee, have already been arrested.
The ED counsel said on Thursday that the investigating officers of the central agency had seized the files (from the office of Leaps and Bounds) on the basis of an order by Justice Sinha, who had asked the agency to expedite the probe against Abhishek Banerjee.
