Kolkata: The Enforcement Directorate on Tuesday began interrogating West Bengal Forest Minister Jyoti Priya Mallick in its custody, a day after a privately owned city hospital, where he was admitted, submitted a fit certificate of him, official sources here said.
The ED got the fit certificate from the Apollo Hospital and the federal probe agency submitted the same to the Bankshall Court in the city on Monday and the took the Minister, who was also earlier state food minister, into the CGO Complex, Salt Lake, and began questioning him into the alleged irregularities of PDS ( public distribution system, statutory rations) during the Covid period, sources confirmed.
Mallick was arrested in the wee hours on Friday last after marathon questioning and raids at several properties of Mallick the previous day and produced at the city court in the afternoon.
When the judge announced 10 days’ ED custody upto November 5, the minister immediately fell semi-unconscious in the courtroom and accordingly the judge ordered the minister’s admission to a city hospital.
The court also said the ED custody will begin when the minister was released from the hospital with a fit certificate from the constituted medical board.
Sources said the questioning of his alleged involvement in the ration scam was continuing when this report came from the CGO Complex.
Sources said the ED, probing Calcutta High Court-monitored money trails in the scam, sought to know his known sources of income as well as those of his wife and daughter.
It was alleged that the names of his wife and daughter appeared in the banks where the duo had deposited nearly Rs 4 crore during the notebandi in November onwards in 2016.
The ED also separately questioned Maliick’s present and past personal assistants Amit Dey and Avijit Das respectively at the CGO complex on Tuesday.
Dey was grilled for over 10 hours on Monday.
