By IANS
New Delhi : The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) Friday filed a charge sheet against former Uttar Pradesh chief secretary Akhand Pratap Singh and 11 others, including his wife and daughters, in a Rs.10 billion disproportionate assets case.
The charge sheet was filed in the court of CBI Special Judge I.K. Kochhar.
The 11 accused are his wife Neelam Singh, his two married daughters Juhi and Java, two nieces of the wife, one of her nephews, the husband of one of the nieces, a brother of his son-in-law as well as three close associates.
The three associates charge sheeted are K.M. Khandelwal, a contractor with Noida Development Authority, and his brother B.P. Khandelwal, who is former chairman of the Central Bureau of Secondary Education (CBSE), and Madan Pal Singh.
The charge sheet was filed against main accused Akhand Pratap Singh under sections 109 (abetment), 120 B (criminal conspiracy), 467 (forgery), 471 (using forged documents) of the Indian Penal Code and sections of the Prevention of Corruption Act.
The 11 have been charge sheeted for having aided and abetted his corrupt activities and for conspiring in forging the documents used for the illegal acquisitions.
Akand Pratap Singh, presently on bail, was arrested Sep 25 last year. He was chief secretary in the previous Mulayam Singh Yadav regime in Uttar Pradesh and has cases of cheating, forgery and amassing disproportionate assets when in power filed against him since March, 2005.
According to the corruption case registered against him in 2005, Singh acquired as many as 84 immovable properties in Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand worth Rs.2 billion. He had 100 bank accounts in his and his family members’ names in Delhi, Noida, Greater Noida, Lucknow, Ghaziabad, Behraich and Nainital.
He is also accused of forging the signatures of his dead father and a friend for transferring the properties and routing financial transactions through several fictitious bank accounts.
After the case against Singh was registered, the CBI in 2005 conducted raids at 16 places and allegedly discovered huge properties in his name and in the name of his daughters.
The CBI sleuths arrested him from his Vasant Kunj farmhouse while he was attempting to flee.
Singh, a 1967-batch IAS officer who retired in 2003, had invested huge sums of money in several private limited companies with his relatives, friends and family members, who were shown as promoters and directors of the companies
He is the second chief secretary of Uttar Pradesh in a row to be caught in a disproportionate assets case. Earlier, his predecessor D.S. Bagga was nailed and suspended in the multi-crore Taj Corridor scam.