On February 15, the NCP led by breakaway Maharashtra deputy chief minister Ajit Pawar said it would field Patel for the Rajya Sabha elections.
New Delhi: The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has closed a corruption case involving Nationalist Congress Party (Ajit Pawar faction) leader Praful Patel registered in 2017.
The CBI in May 2017, on the orders of the Supreme Court, registered a case against officials of the Ministry of Civil Aviation and Air India to probe allegations of irregularities in leasing aircraft for Air India.
After investigating the case for around seven years, the CBI has closed the investigation, giving a clean chit to Praful Patel and then officials of MoCA and Air India, sources said. The closure report has been filed before the competent court in March 2024.
On July 5, 2023, then NCP working president Praful Patel (appointed to the job only a month before) said that he “felt like laughing” when he went with NCP supremo Sharad Pawar to the Patna for the INDIA meeting on June 23. “I went to the joint opposition meeting in Patna with Pawar Saheb and I felt like laughing when I saw the scene there. There were 17 Opposition parties there, seven of them have only 1 MP in the Lok Sabha and one party has no MP at all,” Patel, a former civil aviation minister in the Congress-led UPA government, was reported as having said mockingly.
This story was originally published in thewire.in. Read the full story here.