Cattle scam: Sixth mysterious lottery award comes under CBI scanner

Kolkata, Nov 18 (IANS) The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) probing the lottery award angle in the multi-crore cattle smuggling scam in West Bengal, has traced yet another lottery award prize, which is the sixth such instance.

However, unlike the earlier five lottery awards, which went to the credit of either Trinamool Congress leader Anubrata Mondal or his daughter Sukanya Mondal, the sixth one has gone in favour of Enamul Houque, one of the main accused in the cattle smuggling scam.

According to CBI sources, from the bank accounts of Houque they have traced a credit of Rs 50 lakh to his account as lottery prize award in the year 2017. Incidentally, this award going to credit of Houque was also from the same lottery company, five of whose awards had gone to the credit of Anubrata Mondal and Sukanya Mondal.

The central agency officials are now almost sure that so many lottery awards within a specific period cannot be a matter of just coincidence and that these lottery awards have some links with the diversion of cattle smuggling proceeds.

They doubt that the lottery award might have been won by someone else, who instead of claiming that award sold the lottery to a third party against a fixed amount and that third party claimed the lottery award to convert the unaccounted money into accounted one.

On November 11, the CBI while checking the bank accounts of Sukanya Mondal traced a credit of Rs 50 lakh to one of the bank accounts of Sukanya Mondal as a lottery award. This is the fifth lottery whose award prizes went to the credit of either Sukanya Mondal or her father.

As per records traced by the CBI sleuths, this lottery with an award of Rs 50 lakh was credited to Sukanya Mondal in January, 2020.

This January, her father, Anubrata Mondal won a lottery award of Rs 1 crore.

Apart from that, the CBI earlier traced three similar lottery award proceeds going to bank accounts of Mondal and his daughter.

Two lottery award prizes amounting to a total of Rs 51 lakh were transferred in two phases, -- Rs 25 lakh and Rs 26 lakh -- to the bank account of Sukanya Mondal in the closing quarters of 2018.

A few months after that in 2019, another lottery award prize of Rs 10 lakh was transferred to the account of Anubrata Mondal.