(MENAFN- Live Mint) "Lok Sabha elections 2024: The Central Bureau of Investigation has closed a 2017 corruption case involving Nationalist Congress Party (Ajit Pawar camp) leader Praful Patel ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, The Wire reported on Thursday May 2017, on the orders of Supreme Court, the CBI had registered a case to probe the allegations of irregularities in leasing aircraft for Air India. Several officials of the Ministry of Civil Aviation and of Air India were put under scanner CBI, after investigating the case for nearly seven years, closed the investigation. The probing agency has given a clean chit to Patel and the then MoCA and Air India officials, The Wire's report said citing sources CBI in March 2024 filed the closure report before the competent court, in July last year, Praful is among the rebel NCP leaders who had sided with Ajit Pawar's NCP faction to form Maharashtra government with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Shiv Sena- Eknath Shinde camp.
It was alleged that the then Aviation minister Praful Patel under the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government had abused his position to lease a large number of aircraft for Air India, which was a public carrier at that time CBI in had also alleged that the aircraft were leased even when aircraft acquisition programme was underway for Air India.A public sector undertaking -- National Aviation Corporation of India Ltd (NACIL) -- was formed after the merger of Air India and Indian Airlines its May 2017 FIR, the CBI alleged,“leasing of aircraft for Air India was done by the public servants of MoCA and NACIL despite the airlines running with very low load because of large scale aircraft acquisition and several flights, especially overseas flights running almost empty at huge loss.”The investigation revealed that the“lease agreements were adopted for acquiring aircraft on lease which did not have an early termination clause, so NACIL was unable to terminate the lease agreements since doing so would have resulted in NACIL paying all costs and lease rental differentials.”\"15 expensive aircraft were leased for Air India for which they did not even had pilots ready, which resulted in huge loss to the company,” the investigation had revealed to the clean-chit to Patel, Congress leader Jairam Ramesh said that the Prime Minister (Narendra Modi) should apologise to former PM Manmohan Singh for its allegations against the UPA 2.
“So this means one high-profile allegation made by the BJP against UPA-2 was BOGUS & FALSE. The PM should now apologise to Dr. Manmohan Singh and to the country!” he wrote in a post on X (formerly Twitter).
MENAFN28032024007365015876ID1108033732
Legal Disclaimer:
MENAFN provides the information “as is” without warranty of any kind. We do not accept any responsibility or liability for the accuracy, content, images, videos, licenses, completeness, legality, or reliability of the information contained in this article. If you have any complaints or copyright issues related to this article, kindly contact the provider above.