Lalu Prasad Yadav Deoghar Fodder Scam Supreme Court Bail Order

The Supreme Court on Tuesday refused to interfere with a Jharkhand High Court order granting bail to Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) chief Lalu Prasad Yadav in the Deoghar treasury fodder scam case and asked the high court to decide his appeal against conviction within six months.

“Upon hearing the learned counsels, we are not inclined to interfere with the order particularly since seven years have elapsed since then. The appeals are of the year 2018, and it will only be appropriate to request the high court to expedite the hearing,” a bench of Justices M M Sundresh and P B Varale ordered, hearing the Central Bureau of Investigation’s (CBI) appeal challenging the high court order.

The case relates to the fraudulent withdrawal of Rs 89.27 lakh from the Deoghar district treasury between 1990 and 1994, when Lalu was the chief minister of Bihar. He was convicted under the Prevention of Corruption Act and sentenced in 2017. On July 12, 2019, the Jharkhand High Court granted him bail as he had served half of his prison term.

Additional Solicitor General S V Raju, appearing for the CBI, contended that Lalu had been convicted in multiple fodder scam cases, and as such, Section 427 of the Criminal Procedure Code would apply, but the high court gave him relief erroneously, treating the sentences as running concurrently. Section 427 deals with sentencing an offender who has already been sentenced for another offence.

“The very yardstick applied is wrong,” Raju argued. The senior law officer said that ordinarily, a sentence given in a subsequent conviction would start only after the earlier sentence expires. He added that the relief was allowed after two earlier applications for suspension of sentence were rejected.

Opposing the prayer to reverse the suspension of sentence, Senior Advocate Kapil Sibal, appearing for Lalu, said that the question whether sentences would run concurrently or not will only arise at the final stage. He argued that the high court had applied a uniform yardstick.

To a specific query from the bench about the status of the appeals in the matter, Raju said Lalu had delayed the trial.

The matter is part of the fodder scam cases that arose during Lalu’s tenure as chief minister of undivided Bihar. Though he was convicted in the cases related to the fraudulent withdrawal of money from the Deoghar, Dumka, and Chaibasa treasuries, which fell in Jharkhand following the division of the state, the Jharkhand High Court gave him bail in the Deoghar treasury matter in 2019, in the Chaibasa treasury matter in October 2020, and in the Dumka treasury case in April 2021.