KOLKATA: On Wednesday morning, geysers and water tanks at a nondescript ground-floor apartment in Salt Lake started spewing new currency notes — all in denominations of Rs 2,000 and Rs 500 — in thousands.The 11 men who had come calling at Maa Anandamoyee Co-operative Housing Society in the township’s HB block were initially taken aback. But soon they got their act together and started prodding and probing around the house.More notes came tumbling out as the shoe rack was given a vigorous shake, the sofa set slashed, the mattress ripped, the clothes trunks rifled and the kitchen loft raided.By noon, the men — all CBI officers — had to requisition several note-counting machines. At the end of the search, they had recovered currency notes that added up to Rs 3.5 crore along with 5kg of gold worth around Rs 1.5 crore and seized a pile of incriminating documents.The house belonged to principal commissioner of income tax (Ranchi) Tapan Kumar Dutta, who was earlier picked up from his Ranchi residence and placed under arrest. It was Dutta who had directed the CBI towards his Salt Lake home, where his wife was present at the time of the raid The CBI had recently registered a case against Dutta for allegedly entering into criminal conspiracy with three other I-T officials and several Kolkata-based businessmen. As part of the deal, Dutta would allegedly accept hefty bribe from the businessmen through a chartered accountant to get the I-T assessment files of different assessees transferred from Kolkata/Hazaribagh to Ranchi, CBI sources said.The raid at the Salt Lake apartment was one of the 23 search operations carried out by the CBI across Ranchi and Kolkata on Wednesday. A special team led by SP Rajiv Ranjan also raided the residence of an Alipore businessman believed to have floated several shell companies in the city. A total of Rs 1.5 crore was reportedly recovered from there too.The raid and recovery at Dutta’s Salt Lake apartment left his upper middle-class neighbours in shock. Many of them had attended Dutta’s daughter’s wedding recently.“Dutta would rarely interact with us. His family has been residing here since 1989 and we were very happy for him when he announced that his son was finally settled in the US. The first time he invited us over was when his daughter got married. At least a thousand people were invited for the occasion at the Stadel. He also hosted us at the local community centre for two days,” said a neighbour who did not wish to be named.Another neighbour said Dutta would be seen riding fancy cars whenever he visited Kolkata. “We always thought these were government pool cars,” he said.