RJD chief Lalu Prasad Yadav has been convicted by the special CBI court in the Deoghar leg of the fodder scam case.
Total 16 people, including Lalu Prasad Yadav, have been found guilty. Six, including former Bihar CM Jagannath Mishra, have been acquitted. Quantum of punishment to be pronounced on January 3.
CBI judge Shivpal Singh pronounced the verdict in a packed courtroom in the case pertaining to fraudulent withdrawal of Rs 89.27 lakh from Deoghar Treasury between 1991 and 1994.
Lalu Prasad, the chief of RJD, and other convicts were taken into custody immediately after the pronouncement of the verdict amig tight security.
The case pertains to the alleged fraudulent withdrawal of ₹84.5 lakh from the Deoghar district (now in Jharkhand) treasury between 1994 and 1996 when Prasad was the Chief Minister.
There are altogether 34 accused in this case, of which 11 have died during the course of the trial.
Lalu Prasad, also the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) chief, reached Ranchi on Friday evening, along with his son Tejashwi Yadav to hear the verdict.
Lalu is hoping for a verdict as in the one on the 2G case in which all the accused have been acquitted.
"I do hope that I will get justice as in the 2G spectrum case ... I have full faith in the judiciary but whatever verdict will come, I will abide by it," Mr. Prasad told presspersons.
"It is the BJP, the RSS and Nitish Kumar who are behind all this ... they want me to be sent to jail so that they will have no political opponent, but they don't know that every worker of the RJD is a Lalu Yadav," he said.
The scam, exposed in 1996, involved the embezzlement of around Rs 1,000 crore from the state exchequer for the purchase of fictitious medicines and fodder for cattle between 1990 and 1997, when Yadav was chief minister.
On September 30, 2013, he was held guilty in the first. Yadav was in jail for a few months in 2013 after a CBI court had convicted him in the first of the fodder scam cases. He got bail in December 2013, three months after he had been convicted. In May this year, the Supreme Court had reinstated criminal conspiracy charges against him in another fodder scam case.
In 2014, the Jharkhand High Court stayed trial against Prasad in four pending fodder scam cases on the ground that a person convicted in one case could not be tried in similar cases based on same witnesses and evidence.
However, the Supreme Court quashed the High Court order in May this year and ordered Lalu to stand trial in all pending cases.
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