21.9.13

CBI Closes DA Case Against Mulayam

The CBI has closed a seven year-old probe into SP chief Mulayam Singh Yadav and his family’s alleged disproportionate assets, citing “grossly insufficient evidence”. The closure of the case came within a fortnight of the end of Parliament’s monsoon session. The SP, which lends outside support to the Congress-led coalition at the Centre, has repeatedly bailed out UPA in Parliament.
The closure report says the exclusion of Yadav’s daughter-in-law, Dimple, from the ambit of the probe, as per a Supreme Court order of last December, necessitated a reassessment of the entire case. The CBI has also admitted glaring mistakes in its own calculations in 2007, when it pegged the entire Yadav family’s DA at Rs.2.63 crore while filing a status report before the SC and then demanded prosecution of the SP chief and his son Akhilesh. This figure was arrived at without taking into account the “defence” of Yadav and his family members who did not join the CBI inquiry in 2007, the agency has said in the report. After duly collecting and examining various documents, the report says, the CBI did not find sufficient evidence to support allegations of possession of any ill-gotten asset, jointly or individually, by Yadav or his family members.
The report refers to a house in Yadav’s native village of Saifai built at Rs.1.41 crore, but says Yadav and his son Akhilesh contributed “less than 10%” to the property while Sughar Singh from Yadav’s extended family actually built the house.

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