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Notes From An Ambulance Siren

Sudipta Sen—large-hearted Santa, dupe and enigma. The man Mamata knew little about.

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Notes From An Ambulance Siren
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Isn’t he the man with three wives, asked Mamata Banerjee when asked if she knew the Saradha Group chief after the chit fund scandal broke. The gentleman admits to having just two, but that has not deterred people from weaving tales around the mystery man accused of having defrauded people and funding the electoral push of Trinamool Congress and its leading lights. But Sudipta Sen’s generosity was hardly confined to Trinamool; it extended to others as well. Like a charitable Santa Claus with bottomless reso­urces, he bailed out film producers, bus­i­nessmen, newspaper & TV channel owners and clubs, besides  donating generously to various causes.

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When Lionel Messi demanded a match fee of Rs 20 crore for appearing in a friendly tie in Calcutta in 2011, the overwhelmed sponsors turned to Sen. Manoranjana Sinh, estranged wife of former Union min­ister Matang Singh, wanted Rs 42 crore to launch a TV channel in the Northeast. She turned to him and fixed a meeting in Chennai with Nalini Chidambaram, the law­yer wife of the then finance minister, presumably to demonstrate her (Singh’s) clout. Sen told  investigators that he hired the services of Chidambaram as a consultant. When Mamata’s paintings were to be auctioned for charity, it was Sen who was persuaded to ‘fund the buyers’.

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But while ‘Sen Sir’ moved around in luxury cars and signed cheques with a flourish, there is speculation about how much of his transactions were in cash. Lurid details in the media suggest that cash collected in the districts were moved to his headquarters in ambulances to evade detection.

The reclusive man in custody for the past one-and-a-half years remains an enigma. Some believe he was a conman who started off as a real estate agent.  What is known is that he was an unknown businessman in 2007, but two years later in 2009 he was launching TV channels and newspapers, including Bengal Post in English and Sakalbela in Bengali. According to now-disgraced CEO  of Saradha Media, Kunal Ghosh, Sen had told Mamata that while she moved from being the CM to the PM’s chair, his media outlets would be there to back her.

Sen was issued a passport in 2004 and launched the Saradha Group, spanning realty, hospitality, travel and tourism etc in 2006, following up with the non-banking financial company in 2008, which promised unrealistically high returns. The ponzi scheme paid off old depositors with money deposited by the new till the bubble burst in early 2013.

Some accounts painted Sen as a soft-spoken businessman, with gushing profiles quoting him thus: “Whatever I see around me, I feel like buying”. But in his badly written 18-page letter to the CBI, he whines of being threatened and blackmailed by journalists, newspaper owners, politicians, even by some of his own staff. He was innocent, he claimed, but was taken for a ride by others. So much so that he claimed to have innocently parted with his signatures on papers, pledging collateral to one Global Automobiles, so that the company could obtain bank loans to make motorcycles, which of course never happened.

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The latest cover of the iconic Bengali magazine Desh caricatures both Sen and Subrata Roy as the ‘best of the Bengalis’ (see grab). Both businessmen are in jail, and for very similar reasons. Perhaps ins­tances of both bad business and bad politics?

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