Cbi To Seek Centres Nod To Chargesheet Laloo Yadav

Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) joint director (east) U N Biswas yesterday said that the investigating agency was likely to send a proposal to the Centre to chargesheet Bihar Chief Minister Laloo Prasad Yadav and other politicians accused in the Rs 950-crore fodder scam by the end of this month.

According to the CBI manual, the decision to chargesheet and arrest important people has to be taken by the Union government, he said.

CBI officials said that Mondays six-hour-long interrogation of the Chief Minister was a mere ritual and added that if we take Yadavs statement on face value, then his entire Cabinet should be arrested, barring him.

The officials maintained that the Chief Minister basically passed the buck to the officials and ministers while claiming his innocence during the interrogation.

According to Biswas, the interrogation was conducted in a cordial atmosphere. We wanted him to speak spontaneously, and he obliged us, the CBI joint director said.

The interrogation had its lighter moments too when the Chief Minister cracked jokes and recalled how he had fractured his leg during Dussehera festivities.

Besides, the interrogation was repeatedly interrupted to meet the Chief Ministers demand for khaini (chewing tobacco).

Interestingly, the Chief Minister had ready answer for all the questions posed by the CBI.

The officials said that on being asked how the prime accused in the scam, S B Sinha and R K Rana, became the local guardians of his children while they were studying in Bishops Westcot School at Ranchi, the Chief Minister feigned ignorance, declaring that he had left the column empty and they might have been filled by Shukla Mohanty, an aunt of the children.

This prompted a CBI official to remark that he had virtually signed his death warrant by this move.

When a senior CBI official was asked by mediapersons how seriously the premier investigating agency took the Chief Ministers plea of innocence, he remarked, An innocent person can be identified by his face and the glow in his eyes and asked the reporters to interpret that innocence by the glow in the Chief ministers eyes and smile.

According to a CBI spokesman, the interrogation mainly centred on the alleged violations of the procedure of budget preparation and cash flow restrictions, undue favours bestowed on some of the prime accused in the case and the alleged favours reciprocated by the scamsters, and hindering Vigilance inquiries against two top officials of the department.

Yadav, the spokesman said, was asked to explain reasons for violation of procedures for budget preparation and quizzed on how fraudulent withdrawals from various treasuries went undetected despite the government order introducing cash flow restrictions, which banned drawal of more than eight per cent of the budgetary allocations at a time.

The investigators questioned the Chief Minister, who also holds the finance portfolio, on alleged fudging of the real accounts of the animal husbandry department in the annual budgets presented in the legislature ever since he assumed the reins of the state in 1990.

In a related development, the CBI yesterday filed an interim chargesheet in case no RC/40/96 against eight accused persons for fraudulent withdrawal of Rs 40 lakh.