The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Thursday arrested a Trinamool Congress leader and a house-staff attached to R.G. Kar Medical College & Hospital, Asish Pande, said to be a close confidant of Sandip Ghosh, in connection with the financial irregularities case pertaining to the state-run medical college and hospital -- an angle that emerged in the course of the investigation into the rape-murder of a junior doctor.
Pande was also once summoned to the CBI's Salt Lake office earlier and questioned in connection with the matter.
Pande's name surfaced for the first time in the second week of September when CBI officials discovered he had stayed at a hotel in Salt Lake on August 9, when the junior woman doctor's body was found there-raped and murdered-in the seminar hall within the R.G. Kar Medical College and Hospital complex.
This is the fifth arrest by the CBI in connection with financial irregularities at R.G. Kar. Earlier in September, Ghosh and three others were arrested in the same case.
Besides Ghosh, the other three arrested in this connection are Afsar Ali, Suman Hazra, and Biplab Sinha.
When Ali was Ghosh's personal bodyguard, Sinha and Hazra were local vendors who had gone out to survey the supply of medical equipment to R.G. Kar when Sandip Ghosh was the principal there.
In addition to investigating the financial anomalies case, the CBI is simultaneously inquiring a case against Ghosh in the rape and murder case.
A polygraph test of Ghosh was also done.
The major accusations against him in the financial scam are that he issued various contracts to private and outsourced parties of his confidence without making it a state health department and college council-approved affair, and he had performed various tasks associated with the infrastructure of the hospital through private outsourced entities or individuals instead of following the convention of getting the same done by the state public works department (PWD).
Further, serious allegations against Sandip Ghosh include the selling of biomedical wastes emanating from hospital campuses, which is also prohibited in law.
Allegations have been made against Ghosh that he was taking money in the guise of running businesses in the name of others through the business run in the hospitals and this again falls within the list of grave offenses committed by a government official.
The most alarming charge in the matter is selling organs of unidentified bodies that were brought to the hospital mortuary for post-mortem at "lucrative prices" outside.
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