RANCHI: The special CBI court hearing the last of the five fodder scam cases against RJD chief Lalu Prasad in Jharkhand on Monday sentenced him to five years in prison and fined him Rs 60 lakh, bringing the curtain down on a Rs 950-crore corruption saga that spawned a multi-pronged investigation and trial spanning 26 years.
Lalu, already serving a combined jail term of 14 years in the other four cases related to fraudulent withdrawals from government treasuries in various districts of then undivided Bihar, watched special judge S K Shashi pronouncing the sentence in the Rs 139.5-crore Doranda treasury embezzlement case from his ward at Ranchi’s Rajendra Institute of Medical Sciences.
In a series of tweets from his official Twitter handle, 73-year-old Lalu claimed he had been “targeted for fighting injustice, inequality and tyranny” and vowed to soldier on. “Main unse ladta hun, jo aapas me logon ko ladate hain; wo hara nai sakte is liye sajishon me fansate hain (I fight against those who make people fight each other. They can’t defeat me; so they hatch a conspiracy against me),” he said
The special court handed a five-year jail term each to five of Lalu’s co-convicts in the case, four years to 32 others and three years to the remaining three. The fines ranged between Rs 1.5 lakh and Rs 2 crore, the highest of these being against suppliers Tripurari Mohan Prasad and Mohammad Syed.
Lalu is still under trial in the lone case pending against him in Bihar, this one pertaining to fraudulent withdrawals from the Banka (Bhagalpur) treasury. The CBI court in Patna has summoned him on February 25 for trial in the case.