There’s a lot that is intriguing in this letter to the CBI by Sudipta Sen, whose Saradha Group started the avalanche of bankruptcy in chit fund-crazy West Bengal – a disaster that is certain to have nationwide consequences in the weeks to come.

Sen, who was arrested from distant Gandermal on April 23, wrote this letter partly to exonerate himself, and partly to harry whoever it is that the Trinamool Congress – caught in the gravest crisis of its 23 months in power – wants to nail (who are, of course, the Left Front, the Congress and, as a bonus, the Congress-led UPA).

A careful reading of this 18-page ramble raises red flags in every paragraph, not only because, at the end, the letter says nothing particularly substantive that will stand up in court, but also because it is replete with the sort of factual gaffes that are not expected of a wheeler-dealer like Sudipta Sen – a softspoken, rarely-photographed Naxalite-turned-confidence man with a Rolodex filled with the names of Trinamool Congress top honchos.

Just to give you a heads-up to the howlers to expect, here are a couple: At nearly the very start of his letter, Sen writes:

In the year 2008 in the month of June, my two drivers namely Ratan and Dipu came to my 64 Shakespeare Sarani Office, and brought one man namely Sri SHIB NARAYAN DAS. Mr. SHIB NARAYAN DAS came in a Bollaro Car and identified himself as money market developer under Prayag Group under Basudev Mondol. Mr. SHIB NARAYAN DAS started a story that money market has a huge market in India and he himself knows the basic chemistry of money market.

In point of fact, “Sri Shib Narayan Das” is just Shib Das, branch manager of office, staff and customer maintenance at the Prayag Group. But it is unlikely that he was the one whom Sen met: in 2008, Shib Das wasn’t an employee of the Prayag Group – he joined the group only in June 2010, and between 2003 and 2006, he was an undergraduate at the Shree Chaitanya College, Habra, North 24 Parganas.

Basudeb Mondal is also not who Sen says he is: the lad is a top-ranking footballer in Prayag United, which is sponsored by the Prayag Group. Sen probably meant Basudev Bagchi, chairman and “chief mentor” of the group.

It would be imprudent to take this letter at face value – which means that anything else in it (and there is a lot in it – laughter, forgetting, madcap breast-beating) is suspect. But if you read between the lines, it’s not difficult to see where this impoverisher of millions of the BPL poor and those scraping by at the bottom rung of the urban ladder is taking the blame for one of the biggest confidence tricks in post-Independence India – away from himself, and away from the Trinamool Congress, which he has bankrolled for the past two years.

Click on the thumbnail below to read Sen's letter.