Controversial former UP chief secretary Neera Yadav and Flex Industries owner Ashok Chaturvedi were today convicted and sentenced to a four-year jail term by a special CBI court here in a land scam case when she was Noida's chief executive officer in 1992-94.
CBI Special Court Judge A K Singh also slapped fines of Rs 50,000 each on the two convicts who were taken to high-security Dasna jail soon after the verdict was pronounced in a jam-packed courtroom.
57-year-old Chaturvedi was handcuffed while being taken to jail but Yadav, 62, who broke down after hearing the judgement, was spared.
The two were convicted and sentenced under Section 13 Prevention of Corruption Act and 120B (conspiracy) of the Indian Penal Code. Yadav was found guilty of having violated the rules in allotting an industrial plot in Noida to Flex Industries.
"It is beyond my view to think about the involvement of bureaucrats in corrupt practices which is found to be correct (in this case) as the prosecution has proved against (former) chairperson Noida Neera Yadav and she is liable for punishment for adopting corrupt practices in allotment to industrialists which was acquired from poor farmers," the judge said in his order.
It is the first conviction in a graft case for Yadav, a 1971 batch IAS officer who was chief secretary during the chief ministership of Mulayam Singh Yadav.
She 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 in 2005. She was also tagged one of the 'most corrupt officers' in a poll held by UP IAS association in 1997.
The CBI chargesheeted her in 2002 in at least four graft cases and since then they were pending in the court. She had been charged with allotting out of turn plots to bureaucrats, politicians, industrialists and her near and dear ones. Judge A K Singh, however, acquitted Yadav in a second land scam case relating to allotment of land to Dr Mahesh Chand Sharma, chairman of Kailash Hospital in Noida.
Sharma was also acquitted in the case. Clad in a pink silk sari, Yadav, who had earlier requested the court to give her a chair owing to her poor health, heaved a sigh of relief when the judge first pronounced her acquittal in the Kailash Hospital case but broke down after hearing her conviction in the Flex case.
Lawyers for Yadav and Chaturvedi said they will file for bail tomorrow in the Allahabad High Court.