Court gives bail to Lalu’s daughter and her husband

A New Delhi court yesterday granted bail to Rashtriya Janata Dal chief Lalu Prasad Yadav’s daughter Misa Bharti and her husband Shailesh Kumar in an alleged Rs80bn money laundering case.The couple was, however, barred from leaving the country till further orders after the special Central Bureau of Investigation court rejected the Enforcement Directorate’s objections on giving them bail.Bharti, an RJD MP, and her husband appeared before the court after they were asked to do so.On December 23 last year, the ED filed a third charge-sheet against Bharti’s chartered accountant Rajesh Agrawal, her husband and others under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act in the money laundering case.The ED last July had filed a supplementary charge-sheet against Agrawal in connection with the case in which the agency named around 35 as accused, including brothers Virendra Jain and Surender Kumar Jain.Agrawal was accused of converting black money into legal sources of income through dubious transactions with the help of the Jain brothers.Meanwhile, the hearing in a fourth multi-million rupee fodder scam involving the RJD chief and former Bihar chief minister concluded in a Ranchi court, which fixed March 15 as the date for delivering judgment.The case relates to the fraudulent withdrawals Rs131mn from December 1995 to January 1996 from the Dumka treasury.Besides Yadav, another former chief minister, Jagganth Mishra, and 30 others are also accused in this case.Yadav was convicted in the first case in 2013 and was sentenced to five years in jail.He was convicted by a special CBI court in the second case on December 23, 2017 and given warded three-and-a-half-years imprisonment on January 6. He was convicted in a third case on January 24.