A court yesterday found former Bihar chief minister and Rashtriya Janata Dal chief Lalu Prasad Yadav was found guilty of corruption in the fodder scam.
The court in the eastern city of Ranchi convicted 16 people, including Yadav, in the scamdating to the early 1990s, when he was chief minister.
Yadav and several officials embezzled state funds totalling nearly Rs9mn destined for cattle fodder between 1991 and 1994.
Judge Shivpal Singh of the Special Central Bureau of Investigation court would pronounce the sentence on January 3, the spokesman of Yadav’s party, Manoj Jha, told reporters.
Yadav faced accusations that, as chief minister, he kept the file for an inquiry against the scandal’s mastermind pending for 16 months and gave extensions to tainted officials despite objections.
The Central Bureau of Investigation had argued that Yadav was aware of the scandal but allowed the looting to continue by his inaction.
This is the second fodder case Yadav has been convicted in.
A total of six such cases are part of a larger scandal that involved the misappropriation of some Rs10bn.
The first case in 2013 cost him his parliamentary seat and disqualified him from contesting elections.
Yadav spent two months in jail before he was granted bail in that case by the Supreme Court.
Jha accused the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of foisting criminal cases on Yadav and said that they would challenge the
verdict in a higher court.
The special court acquitted another former Bihar chief minister, Jagannath Mishra, and six others in the trial lasting two decades.
There were a total of 34 people accused in the case.
Yadav, a former federal railways minister, was sent to Birsa Munda Central Jail soon after the verdict.
His son and RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav was present in court and accompanied his father to the jail.
Angry RJD workers tried to stop the police vehicle when Yadav was being taken to the jail.
In a series of tweets, Yadav attacked the BJP over his conviction, accusing the party of playing “dirty politics” to get votes by tarnishing the image of its opponents.
The RJD chief said he would keep on fighting for social causes till his last breath.
“To hide its failures, false rhetoric and to get votes, the BJP uses every dirty immoral trick in politics to change the public perception of its opponents,” he said.
The judge delivered the judgment at around 3.40pm. The accused appeared in the CBI court at 11am and the judgment was deferred till 3pm.
The court ordered that the properties of two of the accused be seized.
In Patna, senior RJD leader Jagdanand Singh, considered close to Yadav, said: “The RJD will challenge the special CBI court’s order in the High Court soon.”
A former state minister, Singh has termed the CBI as “tota” (parrot) and robot, controlled by the BJP-led central government.
The Congress Party also termed the CBI as behaving like a “pet performing parrot” of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government.
Ahead of the verdict, in Patna, Yadav’s wife Rabri Devi, who is also a former chief minister of Bihar, held special prayers.
Yadav’s elder son Tej Pratap, a former health minister, also visited a temple in the morning to pray for his father.
Former Bihar chief minister Lalu Prasad Yadav is being taken to police custody after he was found guilty by a court in Ranchi for the second time of corruption in the multi-billion rupee scam that saw him banished from parliament in 2013.
