With pressure continuing to build against the tardy progress of the CBI in its investigation in various scams in the state, the premier investigation agency of the country today affected a major shuffle in its ranks at its anti-corruption branch at the city office at Nizam Palace to give more teeth to its investigations.
As a part of the move, an informed source claimed that the officer Jayadevan, heading the anti-corruption wing of the agency, had been shifted to Delhi and an officer in the rank of DIG, who the source identified as Pankaj Kumar Singh has assumed charge to head the wing.
The shuffle in the CBI ranks has assumed significance since the sources in the know claimed that the agency had drawn flaks from several courts, including the Calcutta High Court and the special CBI court at Alipore on number of occasions in connection with its lackadaisical probe, be it the teachers’ recruitment scam, civic body scam and cattle and coal pilferage and illegal mining scam.
Every time, the agency had earned the courts’ reprimand for being slack in its investigation.
It came to such a head that Justices Abhijit Gangopadhyay and Justice Amrita Sinha of Calcutta High Court came down heavily on its progress of investigation and even threatened to issue summons to the director of the CBI for its virtual appearance to give clarifications on its probe going haywire.
Observers also feel that often comparisons are made between the pace of activities of CBI sleuths with their counterparts in Enforcement Directorate (ED), who are conducting parallel probes in these cases though the ambit of probe of the latter is only the money-trail and money-laundering angle in the alleged scams. All these factors seemed to have created pressure on CBI to bring more pace in the investigation and the result was change in the key investigating official in the state, said sources