News Brief
This Is Why Trinamool Strongman Anubrata Mondal’s Daughter Was Arrested By ED
Sukanya Mondal with her father Anubrata in happier times.
Trinamool Congress strongman Anubrata Mondal’s daughter Sukanya was arrested by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Wednesday (26 April) on money-laundering charges.
She is accused of amassing huge properties with money generated from the cattle smuggling scam in which her father, now languishing in Tihar Jail, is a prime accused.
Sukanya Mondal had skipped three of ED’s four summons served on her between October last year and March this year.
She went to the ED office on Wednesday morning and was questioned for seven hours before being arrested. After her arrest, she was taken to the Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital for a checkup.
Senior ED officers told Swarajya that Sukanya had been giving nonsensical and evasive answers to questions on her wealth posed by her interrogators. She could not explain how she had accumulated wealth that was completely non-commensurate with her known sources of income.
Sukanya, a schoolteacher, kept on telling her interrogators she was not aware of the assets and huge sums of money in her bank accounts. This was even after ED officers showed her documents with her signatures on them.
Sukanya reportedly has a fixed deposit of Rs 3 crore at the Salt Lake branch of a bank, and another Rs 2 crore at the Bolpur branch of a bank. She is a resident of Bolpur in Birbhum district.
Sukanya Mondal is also the owner of two companies — ANM Agrochem and Neer Developers Pvt Ltd — whose turnovers run in crores of rupees. She had purchased these two companies.
She is also the joint owner of two rice mills — Shiv Shambhu Rice Mill and Bhole Bom Rice Mill — that she is suspected to have bought with ill-gotten proceeds of the cattle smuggling scam.
Sukanya and her mother Chabi (now deceased) had purchased properties worth Rs 34 crore, mostly in cash. Land deeds bearing Sukanya Mondal’s name that were seized by the CBI (which was ordered by the Calcutta High Court to probe the cattle smuggling scam) show she bought holdings worth over Rs 12 crore between 2015 and 2022.
ED suspects that substantial sums of money obtained from cattle smuggling have been stashed away elsewhere and Sukanya is aware of that.
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