Lucknow: The Allahabad High Court on Thursday ordered a CBI probe into alleged corruption by Noida Chief Engineer Yadav Singh on a PIL accusing him of amassing huge property disproportionate to his known sources of income.
The Lucknow bench of the high court comprising Chief Justice DY Chandrachud and Justice SN Shukla passed the order on a PIL by social activist Nutan Thakur.
The petitioner had given details of Income Tax raids on Yadav's establishments in Delhi, Noida and Ghaziabad on November 27-28, 2014 and alleged recovery of illegal properties and sought a CBI probe into the matter.
Thakur had alleged that she had filed a supplementary affidavit giving facts, including details of various alleged false companies floated by Yadav Singh for siphoning off illegal money.
The state government counsel had opposed the PIL as not being maintainable and noted that the government had also constituted a judicial commission to probe the matter.
The court also directed CBI to include people associated with Yadav Singh in its probe. The state government had suspended the Noida Chief Engineer on December 8, 2014.
Thakur, wife of suspended IG-rank IPS officer Amitabh Thakur, has alleged in her PIL that Yadav Singh had enjoyed plum postings under the regimes of Mulayam Singh Yadav, Mayawati and incumbent Akhilesh Yadav, and the state government was not acting against him.
Raids conducted by the Income Tax Department have shown that Singh owned huge property disproportionate to his known sources of income.
He had executed projects worth around Rs 8,000 crore in Noida in the last 12 years, the Noida authority has said in a report.
The figure excludes Singh's involvement in the authority's land allotment process for commercial, industrial and residential projects.
Singh was involved in infrastructure projects such as Ganga water supply, sewage pipelines, drainage, hospitals, parks and the metro. In the electrical department, Singh had signed bonds of more than Rs 500 crore in last nine years.
Signing a bond means releasing funds to firms after work is executed. After the tax raids on Singh and companies related to his wife Kusumlata, the authority cancelled several projects.
Singh was Engineer-in-Chief of the Greater Noida and Yamuna Expressway Authorities for 17 days, where he gave the go-ahead for 15 public projects -- all cancelled after the raids.
Singh has since been removed from his post and attached to the CEO office. But he has remained absent without applying for leave, prompting the authority to issue him a show-cause notice.
The Mayawati government -- when BSP formed a coalition in Uttar Pradesh with BJP support- had first appointed him as engineer-in-chief of the authority in 2002.
After the Samajwadi Party (SP) ousted BSP in 2003, it transferred Singh and his associates. BSP and SP have denied links with Singh.
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