'Bengal CM guilty of serious penal offence': BJP blasts Mamata Banerjee over 'dramatic showdown' with ED

New Delhi, Jan 9 The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Friday strongly condemned the "utterly irresponsible and unethical" conduct of West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, who "stands guilty of a serious penal offence," for allegedly "trespassing" into a private property under ED probe and also purportedly threatening the sleuths.

Addressing a presser from the BJP HQ, party MP Ravi Shankar Prasad launched a tirade against the Bengal CM and her administration, accusing her of flouting all constitutional norms of governance and hinting that this was a "pressure tactic" to "shield" herself and partymen from the clutches of law.

"The entire action of the Chief Minister is not just unethical, irresponsible, unconstitutional, but she has put the entire government and constitutional conventions to shame. The question arises - is that what is Mamata's linkage to that consultancy firm? There are a lot of suspicious circumstances surrounding it, and this shows that she was trying to rescue something sensitive implicating her and the party," Prasad said.

Underlining the fact that this was first ever incident in the history of Independent India that a sitting Chief Minister broke into the security cordon of ED sleuths, searching the private residence of an individual under lens for alleged money laundering, and walked away with the papers.

"A sitting Chief Minister entered a private property, where the ED team was conducting searches over money laundering, intimidated and threatened the ED sleuths and left the premises after snatching papers from them. The ED was conducting raids in connection with the coal smuggling scam and hawala transactions," he pointed out, while informing the media persons that the raids were carried out only after complaints of largescale of money laundering from the Prateek Jain-led consultancy firm were received.

The BJP leader further questioned the rationale behind the sitting Chief Minister opposing raids by an investigative agency on a private agency, accused of money laundering and also recalled multiple instances from the past, when the Trinamool Congress supremo tried to "stall" the probe by central agencies.

"This is not the first instance; there are multiple instances of Mamata directly interfering with CBI and ED action. From confronting the CBI team in the Sharda scam to blocking the central team from probing the Sandeshkhali episode, to the infamous RG Kar rape incident, where she personally tried to obstruct the probe. Everywhere there is a footprint of Mamata's ecosystem," Prasad said.

The ED raids at I-PAC chief's residence on Thursday kicked up a major political storm in the state, which is slated to go to Assembly polls this year.

CM Mamata and Trinamool Congress accused the BJP of "witch-hunt" against her party, while the BJP countered her claims by labelling her as "destructor of democracy".

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