UP babu hires top lawyers who charge up to ₹20L per day

What do India’s top lawyers — Soli Sorabjee, Harish Salve, Mukul Rohatgi and others — have in common? They have all defended a mid-level bureaucrat in Uttar Pradesh who is accused of amassing disproportionate assets worth crores and running scores of fake bank accounts.

A bevy of legal luminaries have appeared multiple times in the Supreme Court and Allahabad high court individually over the past three years to defend Arun Mishra, chief engineer with the UP State Industrial Development Corporation (UPSIDC).

The unusual part — Mishra draws a monthly salary of just over ₹1 lakh while it is understood that the lawyers often charge a fee ranging between ₹5 lakh and ₹20 lakh per day.

Despite repeated attempts, Mishra was not available for comment. A peon at his office said he wasn’t available and it wasn’t clear when he would arrive.

The CBI arrested him in 2011 for allegedly operating 65 fake bank accounts with the Punjab National Bank, Dehradun, where he is supposed to have parked black money.

In 2011 also, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) seized his properties on Prithviraj Road in Delhi’s Lutyens Zone, and Dehradun. The Prithviraj Road property, apparently bought in the name of a company called Ajanta Merchants, where his wife and father are listed as directors, is alone worth about ₹300 crore.

Among his other alleged properties are 60 acres in UPSIDC Industrial Park on Kursi Road in Barabanki and the Asia School of Engineering and Management on another 52 acres. Court records show he and his family have two palatial houses in Lucknow, five properties in Dehradun and 100 acres in Barabanki.

After the CBI investigation into the Dehradun fake accounts case, the SIT filed an FIR against Mishra over his alleged disproportionate assets in 2011 and the probe is ongoing. The bureaucrat also faced charges in the 2007 Tronica City scam in Ghaziabad, where officers allegedly gave away more than 400 plots at throwaway prices.

Mishra had joined UPSIDC as assistant engineer in 1986 and became chief engineer in 2002 — superseding many others — at a time he held the coveted charge of managing director of the corporation. In August 2014, Mishra was dismissed from UPSIDC on the orders of Allahabad high court for getting his job on forged degrees.

But he moved the SC challenging the high court’s decision.

In the high court, he was defended by Shanti Bhushan, who apparently would fly down to Allahabad whenever there was a hearing, sources said.