The sixth case of a lottery award winner has been identified by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which is looking into the case of money laundering through lottery awards from money earned in cattle smuggling in West Bengal.
Enamul Houque, one of the major suspects in the cattle smuggling fraud, has won the sixth lottery prize, in contrast to the first five, which went to either Trinamool Congress leader Anubrata Mondal or his daughter Sukanya Mondal.
According to CBI sources, they were able to identify a credit of Rs. 50 lakh to Houque’s account as a lottery winner reward in 2017. By coincidence, the lottery firm from which Houque received this award was the same one from whom Anubrata Mondal and Sukanya Mondal received five other prizes.
Officials from the central agency are now almost certain that a large number of lottery prizes given out in a short period of time cannot be the result of random chance and that there must be some connection between these lottery prizes and the money diverted from cattle smuggling.
They are skeptical that someone else may have won the lottery prize and then sold it to a different party for a certain sum, who then won the lottery prize to turn the unaccounted money into accounted money.
The CBI discovered a credit of Rs. 50 lakh On November 11, as a lottery prize to one of Sukanya Mondal’s bank accounts while investigating her bank accounts. This is the fifth lottery in which Sukanya Mondal or her father received the reward prizes.
After tracing the lottery prize, it was revealed that the sum of Rs 50 lakh went to Sukanya Mondal in January 2020. The CBI have also traced three previous transactions to Mondal and his daughter’s bank account as lottery prize money.
Mondal also won a lottery of Rs. 1 crore earlier this year in January and has also increased the suspicion of money laundering. Many opposition party leaders have also called out the TMC leader for money laundering.
