7 Dec : Former UP chief secretary Neera Yadav was sentenced to four years imprisonment by a special CBI court in Ghaziabad after it found her guilty of large-scale bungling in allotment of plots as chief of Noida Development Authority seven years back.
CBI Special Court Judge A K Singh also convicted Chairman and Managing Director of Flex Industries Ltd Ashok Chaturvedi in the case and sentenced him to four years prison term. The court also slapped fines of Rs 50,000 each on the two convicts.
After the pronouncement of the judgement on Tuesday, Yadav and Chaturvedi were sent to the Dasna District Jail. While Chaturvedi was handcuffed, Yadav was spared.
Yadav was found guilty of having violated the rules in allotting an industrial plot in Noida to Flex Industries.
She had also been charged with allotting out of turn plots to bureaucrats, politicians, industrialists and her near and dear ones.
The petition against Yadav and others was filed by the Noida Entrepreneurs Association alleging bungling in the allotment of land in different sectors and in commercial Sector 18 in Noida during her tenure as head of Noida’s Development Authority.
The former chief secretary, who was present in the court, broke down after the judge pronounced the verdict.
She had earlier requested the court to give her a chair owing to her poor health. Chaturvedi was also there in the court.
The court, however, acquitted Yadav in a second case of land scam relating to allotment of land to Dr Mahesh Chand Sharma, chairman of Kailash Hospital in Noida.
Sharma was also acquitted in the case. Neera had heaved a sigh of relief when the judge first pronounced her acquittal in the Kailash Hospital case but broke down after hearing the second verdict.
CBI had filed chargesheets against Yadav, Chaturvedi and Sharma and the cases were pending in the court for last over five years. Earlier they had been granted bail by the court.
Yadav, who was chief secretary during the chief ministership of Mulayam Singh Yadav, had earned the dubious distinction of being the country’s first IAS officer to be removed from the chief secretary’s post by the Supreme Court on charges of corruption.