Guwahati, April 27: Assam cabinet minister Himanta Biswa Sarma today served a legal notice on arrested Saradha Group chief Sudipta Sen as the campaign to take fraudulent financial companies to task intensified in the region.

Sarma’s counsel Padmadhar Nayak told this correspondent that the four-page legal notice was posted in the first half of the day and that Sarma had denied all the charges Sen had levelled in a letter purportedly written by him to the CBI. “If my client (Sarma) does not get an unconditional public apology from Sen within 30 days for tarnishing his image, we will initiate appropriate legal action both under criminal and civil laws,” Nayak said.

The letter to the CBI alleged that Sarma “dramatically cheated” Sen; that he had not taken less than Rs 3 crore and all in cash from Sen; that vouchers of the said payment was signed by Sarma’s office executives and that all the amount was given from Sen’s Calcutta office.

Sarma in his legal notice wanted disclosure of the office executives who had received any money from Sen’s Calcutta office by signing vouchers and copies of the vouchers signed by his office staff/office executives.

Sarma will also send a notice to Dibon Deka, a senior employee of Saradha Group who had accused him, former director-general of police Sankar Baruah and Publication Board, Assam, secretary Sadananda Gogoi for their alleged links with the company, which is in the eye of storm for duping depositors.

In a related development, Congress MP from Arunachal Pradesh Takam Sanjoy urged Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to probe financial companies in the Northeast not operating under RBI norms.

Sanjoy told this correspondent that in his letter to Singh yesterday he had conveyed how most financial companies were fraudulently collecting money from the poor people of Assam and Arunachal Pradesh and that the companies needed to be pulled up.

Sanjoy said all these companies were operating out of Assam and he had brought this to the notice of chief minister Tarun Gogoi several times since 2012 with a plea for crackdown.

Dispur said a special investigating team had been looking into the cases since 2011 and the government was planning to hand over major cases to the CBI.

Gogoi said since he was already getting ready to move the department of personnel seeking CBI probe into some of the major cases involving deposit-collecting companies, there was no need to publish a white paper on the activities of the Saradha group.