Overview
- The Supreme Court on Tuesday, July 14, 2026, declined the CBI’s plea to cancel the Jharkhand High Court’s 2019 order that suspended Lalu Prasad Yadav’s sentence and granted him bail in the Deoghar fodder-treasury case.
- The bench cited the prolonged pendency of criminal appeals since 2018 as a reason not to disturb Yadav’s liberty and asked the Jharkhand High Court to dispose of the appeals preferably within six months.
- The CBI, through ASG S.V. Raju, argued that the High Court wrongly treated sentences from multiple convictions as running concurrently and that Section 427 requires them to run consecutively unless the court directs otherwise.
- Senior advocate Kapil Sibal for Yadav countered that the concurrent-versus-consecutive question under Section 427 is for final adjudication and that the High Court lawfully exercised discretion in suspending the sentence during the appeal.
- The Deoghar case involves alleged fraudulent withdrawals of about Rs 89 lakh and forms part of the larger fodder-scam litigation with dozens of related cases and multiple convictions against Yadav that will be addressed when the High Court hears the pending appeals.