Allahabad: The Allahabad High Court today
granted bail to former Uttar Pradesh Chief Secretary Neera
Yadav and industrialist Ashok Chaturvedi, sentenced to four
years imprisonment in a Noida land scam case last week.
Justice Vinod Prasad passed the order on bail
petitions of Yadav, who had been held guilty for
irregularities in allotment of industrial land plots in NOIDA
while she was the CEO of NOIDA Authority in the 1990s, and
Chaturvedi, who owns Flex Industries.
62-year-old Yadav and Chaturvedi, 57, were lodged in
the high-security Dasna jail in Ghaziabad on December 7.
The High Court had on Friday put off till Monday its
decision on their petitions.
The CBI special court had convicted the two under
Section 13 Prevention of Corruption Act and 120B (conspiracy)
of the Indian Penal Code.
A 1971 batch IAS officer, Yadav 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 as one of the "most corrupt
officers" in a poll held by UP IAS association in 1997.
"I have full regard for the honourable court but I am
innocent... I don't feel I have committed any wrong during the
tenure of my service as an IAS officer," Yadav, who took
voluntary retirement in 2007, had told reporters after the
trial court order.
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 plots out of turn to
bureaucrats, politicians, industrialists and her near and dear
ones.
Judge A K Singh, however, had 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.
-PTI
First Published: Tuesday, December 14, 2010, 00:38