On an application moved by the Economic Offences Wing of the UP Police, a Lucknow court has ordered reinvestigation of a case involving giving loans for industrial promotion by the Pradeshiya Industrial and Investment Corporation of Uttar Pradesh Ltd (PICUP) between 1989 and 1992.

The case covers the period when Congress MP and former bureaucrat P L Punia was managing director of the corporation.

In all, loans totalling Rs 120 crore were sanctioned to 27 companies which, the investigation showed, did not exist.

While accepting the EOW application, Judicial Magistrate Abid Shamim on Thursday ordered that the investigation should be assigned to an officer above the rank of a deputy SP.

The EOW, which had filed charge-sheets against the defaulters in 2004, sought a reinvestigation after the present MD of PICUP Archana Agrawal sent a letter to the state government recommending a fresh probe.

No officer of PICUP is named in the charge-sheets, sources said.  

Sources in the Home Department said the EOW has been asked to first probe the case against Manu and Companies, owned by Sant Ram Aditya and his associates of Delhi. Sant Ram, as managing director of the company, had borrowed Rs 7 crore during Punia’s tenure in 1989-90, sources said.

Punia, who had served as principal secretary to the chief ministers like Mulayam Singh Yadav and Mayawati, is presently the Congress MP from Barabanki.

An officer who had initially supervised the probe said Sant Ram had obtained the loans against properties he claimed he owned at various places, including Nainital and Haldwani (both now in Uttarakhand), Rampur, Moradabad and Kanpur Dehat.

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