india

Updated: Apr 12, 2019 12:58 IST

The disproportionate case against Mulayam Singh Yadav had been closed in 2013, the CBI told the Supreme Court on Friday confirming the Samajwadi Party founder‘s stand that he had been cleared of corruption charges by the probe agency.

In his affidavit filed on Thursday, Mulayam Singh Yadav had also claimed that the allegation of disproportionate assets (DA) against him and his family members was politically motivated. The CBI, however, appeared to contest this stand, pointing that the CBI had only registered the premilinary inquiry against the Uttar Pradesh chief minister on the Supreme Court’s orders.

A bench of the top court headed by Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi that heard the CBI on Friday told the probe agency to file an affidavit listing its stand within four weeks.

Advocate Vishwanath Chaturvedi, who had petitioned the Supreme Court for an inquiry into assets held by Mulayam Singh Yadav and his family back in 2005, had recently asked the top court for a status report on its probe.

Chaturvedi complained that the CBI had failed to update the court on the status of investigations against Yadav and his sons despite a lapse of 11 years since a petition was first filed in the Supreme Court. In 2005, Chaturvedi had alleged that Mulayam Yadav had amassed assets amounting to over ₹100 crore during his tenure as chief minister of Uttar Pradesh between 1999 and 2005.

Yadav in his affidavit claimed that CBI had closed the DA case against him and his family members saying that “no prima facie case is made out against them”.

In 2007, the Supreme Court ordered the CBI to conduct a preliminary enquiry into the Yadav family’s assets and “after scrutinizing if a case is made out then to take further action in the matter”.

Mulayam Yadav said that the CBI filed two status reports where the agency came to the conclusion that no case under the Prevention of Corruption Act was made out. In addition, after the CBI’s scrutiny of assets held by his family, the income tax department also stepped in but could not find anything.

Opposing status report by the CBI in the DA case against him, Yadav has relied on the 2007 judgment and says that there was no direction to CBI to register a first information report against him or submit a report to the court on the matter.

(With agency inputs)