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Retired Allahabad High Court Judge Narayan Shukla (File) The government has granted the CBI sanction to prosecute retired Allahabad High Court Judge Shri Narayan Shukla in an alleged corruption case. Shukla is accused of accepting bribes for giving a favourable order to a private medical college barred by the government from giving admissions.
“The sanction to prosecute Shukla arrived Thursday evening. Investigations against him are complete and the chargesheet will be filed soon,” a CBI official said.
Shukla, then a sitting judge, was arraigned as an accused along with six others in an FIR registered on December 4, 2019. The matter is related to a 2017 case in which the agency also arrested former Chhattisgarh High Court chief justice I M Quddusi.
The other accused are Quddusi, his associate Bhawana Pandey, Lucknow-based medical college Prasad Education Trust (PET), its owners B P Yadav and Prasad Yadav, and one Sudhir Giri.
According to the CBI FIR, the PET-run Prasad Institute of Medical Sciences was among 46 colleges barred by the government in 2017 from admitting students for two years due to lack of facilities.
The college challenged the order in the Supreme Court which directed the government to consider afresh the material on record, the FIR said. Apart from barring the college from giving admissions for 2017-18 and 2018-19, the government also authorised the Medical Council of India to encash the college’s bank guarantee of Rs 2 crore.
While the college promoters approached the SC with a petition, they also allegedly got in touch with Justice Quddusi and Bhawana Pandey who promised to get the matter settled.
According to the FIR, a conspiracy was allegedly hatched among B P Yadav, Quddusi, Pandey and Giri (who owns Venkateshwara Medical College in Meerut) “in order to obtain a favourable order from Justice Shri Narayan Shukla of High Court of Allahabad at Lucknow Bench by corrupt and illegal means. In furtherance of the said conspiracy, Quddusi engaged Shukla for managing the matter.”
The FIR alleged the promoters filed a petition in the Allahabad High Court on August 25, 2017. In an interim relief, the High Court ordered that the “petitioner college shall not be delisted from the list of colleges notified for counselling till the next date of listing i.e. August 31, 2017”. It also stayed encashment of the bank guarantee by the Medical Council of India till the next date of hearing.
It said that on the morning of August 25, Quddusi and Yadav met Shukla at his Lucknow residence and “delivered the illegal gratification”.
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