Ahead of West Bengal elections, West Bengal’s ruling Trinamool Congress on Monday faced an embarrassment after several of its leaders accused of bribery in the sting operation. They were allegedly caught on camera accepting bribes. With the opposition coming out all guns blazing, the Mamata Banerjee’s party rubbished the claims calling the videos “doctored” and part of a “smear campaign” against it.
This purported STING OPERATION carried out by Narada News, a news website, was aired on Monday on its website, which shows as many as 11 leaders of the Trinamool Congress (TMC) — including former union ministers, state ministers and MPs being allegedly bribed to help a fictitious Chennai-based company get business in the state.
Watch the Sting Operation here:
Journalists Mathew Samuel and Angel Abraham of Narada News set up a fictitious company called Impex Consultancy in 2014 and approached several leaders of the party “seeking favours” for this entity. The website claimed to have incurred expenses of up to Rs 1 crore to bribe politicians and middlemen. Most of the purported conversations happened over two years between January 2014 and January 2016.
“This was an attempt to unravel what is happening behind closed doors,” the report on the website claimed. The website even listed each of the leaders amounts ranging from Rs. 4 lakh to Rs. 20 lakh that it said it had paid.
Following is the full list of people who were allegedly caught accepting bribes in Narada News’ sting operation:
- MH Ahmed Mirza (Senior police officer) – 5 Lakh
- Mukul Roy (former union and railway minister) – 20 Lakh
- Subrata Mukherjee (Minister for panchayat and rural dvpt) – 5 Lakh
- Sultan Ahmed (former union minister and MP) – 5 Lakh
- Sugata Roy (former union minister) – 5 Lakh
- Suvendu Adhikari (TMC youth wing president) – 5 Lakh
- Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar (political leader) – 4 Lakh
- Prasoon Banerjee (MP) – 4 Lakh
- Shovon Chatterjee (Mayor of kolkata) – 5 Lakh
- Madan Mitra (former minister of transport) – 5 Lakh
- Iqbal Ahmed (Member of west Bengal assembly) – 5 Lakh
- Firhad Hakim (Minister of urban development) – 5 Lakh
If the videos from the sting operation are authentic, it is extremely shocking and shameful, to see senior members of the same party indulging in corrupt practices of this magnitude.