ED questions Odisha CA officials

 The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Monday interrogated four Odisha Cricket Association (OCA) officials including its general secretary Ashirbad Behera in connection with the sporting body’s financial transactions with some of the State based tainted chit fund companies.

The questioning went on for more than five hours at the ED’s branch office here.
The multi-crore chit fund scam is currently being investigated by the CBI under the direction of the Supreme Court. However, the activities of some of the chit fund companies are also being separately probed by the ED. One among them is state based Arhta Tatwa (AT) group which had financial transactions with the OCA. Several officials of the AT group including its CMD Pradip Sethi are currently behind the bars after their arrest by the CBI.

The AT group had bought one of the teams that had participated in the Odisha Premier League (OPL), a tournament organised by the OCA in the lines of IPL a few years back. The tournament has now been scrapped. The AT group was also one of the main sponsors of the whole tournament.

Last year, Behera and his associates had been summoned and questioned by the CBI more than once about the OCA’s financial transactions with the AT group.

“I have provided them all the information they wanted. I answered all the questions satisfactorily. They questioned me on the same issue the CBI had asked earlier,” Behera told reporters.