Saradha scam: CBI custody of football official extended

Kolkata, Aug 26 : A court here Tuesday rejected the bail plea of East Bengal Football Club official Debabrata Sarkar, arrested in the Saradha scam, and extended his CBI custody till Aug 29.

Scam kingpin Sudipta Sen along with other key accused Debjani Mukherjee, Manoj Nagel, Somnath Dutta and Arvind Singh Chauhan and suspended Trinamool Congress MP Kunal Ghosh were meanwhile remanded to judicial custody till Sep 8. The accused were presented before the court of Additional Chief Judicial Magistrate Haradhan Mukhopadhyay following the expiry of their respective CBI and judicial custody. Ghosh however, was spared a personal appearance owing to ill health. While Sen and Sarkar were under the custody of Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), the others were under judicial remand. After taking over the investigation of the multi-crore rupee scam in West Bengal earlier in May, the CBI affected its first arrest when it nabbed Sarkar Aug 20. It subsequently arrested Kolkata businessman Sandhir Agarwal Aug 24. Sen, the Saradha promoter, had accused both Sarkar and Agarwal of extorting crores of rupees from him. A host of high profile names including the likes of state minister Shyamapada Mukherjee, actress and film maker Aparna Sen, Trinamool MP Ahmed Hassan Imran and former Indian Police Service officer Rajat Majumdar have been grilled by the CBI or the Enforcement Directorate in the scam. (IANS)