Neera Yadav gets 4-yr jail

LUCKNOW: A special court of the Central Bureau of Investigation has sentenced former Uttar Pradesh chief secretary Neera Yadav to four years imprisonment after finding her guilty in a 2002 land allocation case.

The charges pertain to illegal allocation of commercial plots in Noida while Yadav, a 1971 batch IAS officer, was the chief executive of the New Okhla Industrial Development Authority.

Despite a barrage of corruption charges against her, Yadav was named chief secretary of Uttar Pradesh in 2005 by the Mulayam Singh Yadav government. In an unprecedented move, the Supreme Court then intervened to direct her removal from the post.

The CBI special court also convicted Uflex chairman and managing director Ashok Chaturvedi in the same case and convicted him to four years imprisonment. Yadav and Chaturvedi have also been fined Rs 50,000 each.

Shares of Uflex fell by 19.99% to hit a lower circuit of Rs 194.95 on the Bombay Stock Exchange. The scrip saw a similar pattern on the National Stock Exchange and fell to Rs 195.50.

Apart from favouring Uflex, Yadav is accused of large-scale irregularities and making out-of-turn allotment of plots to her kith and kin, bureaucrats, politicians and industrialists.

The UP IAS Association ranked her among the most-corrupt officers in a poll conducted in 1997. Yadav took voluntary retirement when Mayawati came to power in 2007. Her husband, Mahendra Singh, a former police officer, was a minister in the BJP government in the state. Singh later joined the Samajwadi Party. Both Singh and Yadav joined BJP in 2009.

Sixty-two-year-old Yadav broke down in court after her conviction. She and Chaturvedi were taken to the high-security Dasna prison immediately after the verdict. Both convicts complained of chest pain in the jail.

The Noida Entrepreneurs Association had approached the Supreme Court against Yadav in 1998, alleging large-scale bungling in the allotment of land in different sectors and in the highly sought after Sector 18 in Noida during her tenure as head of Noida's Development Authority. The apex court directed CBI to probe the matter. Yadav claimed that she was framed because she belonged to a Backward caste.

According to CBI, Yadav showed undue favour to Chaturvedi by allotting his company residential plots. Rates were reduced and eligibility criteria altered to favour the company. Though the initial criteria required Rs 10 crore as a company's net worth and Rs 30 crore as annual turnover, it was altered to Rs 3 crore and Rs 10 crore, respectively, to favour Flex. In the process, the government suffered a loss of Rs 1.12 crore, CBI contended.

After a writ petition was filed by the Centre for Public Interest Litigation, the Supreme Court in 2005 directed the Mulayam Singh government to remove Yadav as chief secretary, as she was facing 23 departmental proceedings at that time and was chargesheeted in corruption cases. Mulayam had then shifted her to the less significant post of Revenue Board chairman.