A special court of the Central Bureau of Investigation pushed the sentencing of former Bihar Chief Minster Lalu Prasad Yadav and others in a fodder scam case to Thursday, ANI reported. The CBI court in Ranchi postponed the pronouncement of the quantum of sentence because of the death of advocate Vindeshwari Prasad.
The bench, however, found Rashtriya Janata Dal leaders Raghuvansh Prasad Singh and Manoj Jha, as well as former Bihar Deputy Chief Minister and Lalu Prasad Yadav’s son Tejashwi Yadav, guilty of contempt of court. It summoned the three to court on January 23.
On December 23, the court had convicted Yadav and 14 other people in one of the six fodder scam cases. Yadav has been lodged at the Birsa Munda Central Jail in Ranchi since. The court had acquitted seven people, including Jagannath Mishra, who is another former chief minister of Bihar.
This is the second case in the scam and is connected with the alleged fraudulent withdrawal of Rs 84.5 lakh from the Deoghar district treasury between 1994 and 1996, when Yadav was Bihar’s chief minister. The scam – exposed in 1996 – involved around Rs 1,000 crore being embezzled from the state exchequer for the purchase of fictitious medicines and fodder for cattle between 1990 and 1997.
Yadav had spent 87 days in jail in 2013 after being convicted in an earlier case in the scam before the Supreme Court granted him bail.
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