The Enforcement Directorate has issued fresh summons to RJD chief Lalu Prasad and his son and Bihar Deputy Chief Minister Tejashwi Yadav to appear for questioning at its Patna office in connection with the alleged railways land-for-jobs money laundering case, official sources said on Friday.
While Prasad has been asked to depose on January 29, Tejashwi has been called the next day. A team of the federal agency went to the official residence of Prasad’s wife and former Bihar chief minister Rabri Devi in Patna to deliver the summons, they said.
The two have been asked to depose at the Enforcement Directorate office on Bank Road in the Bihar capital city. The summons came on a day when Lalu Prasad along with Tejashwi Yadav called on his alliance partner, JD(U) head and Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar.
Tejashwi later told reporters that rumours of a rift were divorced from ”ground reality”. The two skipped the earlier summonses issued in this case by the ED for appearance in Delhi.
Tejashwi, however, has appeared once before the agency in this case in Delhi last year. It is understood that the two had told the ED that they were engaged in their political and official work and hence could not depose in Delhi.
The alleged scam relates to the period when Prasad was the railway minister in the UPA-1 government. On January 9, the ED filed a charge sheet in the railways land-for-jobs linked money laundering case, naming Lalu Prasad’s family including Rabri Devi, their daughters RJD MP Misa Bharti and Hema Yadav, among others.
RJD Rajya Sabha MP Manoj Jha, on the day of the filing of the chargesheet, had called the ED action ”vendetta politics” as he accused the BJP of using probe agencies against opposition parties. ”In states where the BJP is weak, agencies are working on strengthening it. This is politics of harassment and torture,” Jha had said.
The BJP is using agencies against parties it is unable to fight politically, the RJD leader alleged. On the ED charge-sheet, Jha had said, ”This is the biggest example of vendetta politics.” The money laundering case, filed under the criminal sections of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), stems from a complaint lodged by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). The CBI has filed a charge sheet in this case earlier.
Lalu Prasad, Rabri Devi and Tejashwi Yadav have been granted bail by a trial court in October in the CBI case. According to the CBI, no advertisement or public notice was issued for appointment, but some residents of Patna were appointed as substitutes in different zonal railways in Mumbai, Jabalpur, Kolkata, Jaipur and Hazipur.
As a quid pro quo, the candidates, directly or through their immediate family members, allegedly sold land to Prasad’s family members at highly discounted rates, up to one-fourth to one-fifth of the prevailing market rates, the CBI alleged. Assets worth more than Rs 6 crore belonging to Rabri Devi, Misa Bharti and linked companies were attached by the ED last year as part of this investigation.
The agency had raided the premises of Chanda Yadav, Ragini Yadav, Hema Yadav, and Abu Dojana in Patna, Phulwari Sharif, Delhi-NCR, Ranchi and Mumbai in March 2023.
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