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GHAZIABAD: BJP leader and former Chief Secretary of the Uttar Pradesh, Neera Yadav was on Tuesday sentenced to four year jail by a special CBI court here in a land scam case.
A 1971-batch IAS officer and 39th chief secretary of Uttar Pradesh, she had joined the BJP on March 29 2009 ahead of the parliamentary polls in the presence of then BJP national president Rajnath Singh, who is an MP from the city.
Neera Yadav, in her speech, said she had joined the BJP as she believed in the party’s policies.
The CBI court has punished her along with an Industrialist Ashok Chaturvedi who also benefited from the land deal in NOIDA.
CBI special court held Neera Yadav guilty of a land scam. The main beneficiary of the scam, Ashok Chaturvedi of the Rs 1,700-crore Uflex Group, has also been similarly jailed for four years. Yadav had reduced land rates and eased the eligibility criterion to benefit Chaturvedi to the tune of Rs 1.12 crore.
The CBI had registered the case on the orders of the Supreme Court. The court also slapped fines of 50,000 rupees each on the two convicts. Neera Yadav was Chief Secretary when Mulayam Singh Yadav was the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh. The NOIDA Entrepreneurs’ Association had filed a writ petition against the allotment of land in different sectors and in commercial Sector 18 of NOIDA during Neera Yadav’s tenure from 1995 to 1997 as CEO of the Authority.
Yadav, who became the first woman in the country to head a state bureaucracy, also has the dubious distinction of being removed from her post in 2004 by the Supreme Court. She was also voted by the UP IAS Association as the most corrupt politician in the state.
The CBI had said in its chargesheet that Yadav’s allotment of two plots to two different companies owned by Chaturvedi cost the government more than a crore in losses. She was accused by the CBI of changing criteria for eligibility for land to benefit Chaturvedi. The CBI registered the case against Yadav in February 1998 on the orders of the Supreme Court.