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By Vidya : Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis and his lawyer Uday Dable on Tuesday deposed before a court that it was an “oversight” on the part of the lawyer that two “insignificant” pending cases against Fadnavis did not reflect in his election affidavit submitted in 2014.
The deposition came against the backdrop of a complaint filed against Fadnavis nine years ago, accusing him of non-disclosure of criminal cases in his election affidavit for 2014 polls.
The two further stated that in 2014, they duly included 22 cases against Fadnavis in the poll affidavit, and leaving out the two said complaints was only an inadvertent mistake. They also claimed that some complaints mentioned in the affidavit are allegedly more serious than the two that were missed out.
Clarifying that he himself had been very busy during the 2014 election, Fadnavis said, “Uday Dable is my local lawyer and I had asked him to collect information about pending criminal cases against me to be mentioned in my nomination form. It appears that he inadvertently left out two complaint cases and therefore, only 22 criminal cases could be mentioned in the affidavit.”
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“There was no intention to deliberately conceal information about the two insignificant complaint cases, and their non-inclusion in the affidavit of Form 26 was sheer inadvertence,” Devendra Fadnavis said, adding that he had no reason to conceal any information in the nomination papers.
Lawyer Dable said that he has been Fadnavis’s lawyer in many cases. “In the election contested by Fadnavis in the year 2014, I was responsible for filling the election form. I gathered information about how many criminal cases are pending against Fadnavis and filed it in election form number 26. I had filled information about 22 cases in the said form. Apart from the said 22 cases, 2 other private cases were also pending against him. But they escaped my notice due to oversight and my mistake,” Dable said.
“As I was handling all the cases against Fadnavis, he trusted me and signed the affidavit as per my instructions. Neither I, nor he had any intention to conceal information,” the lawyer added.
The case pertains to a complaint filed by Satish Uke, an advocate from Nagpur, seeking legal action against Fadnavis for suppressing two pending cases against him while submitting the affidavit for the 2014 Assembly polls in Maharashtra. Uke had stated that there were cases of cheating and forgery against the BJP leader in 1996 and 1998, but he had not disclosed this information in his poll affidavit.
Uke is currently in jail after he was arrested by the Enforcement Directorate on charges of money laundering.
(With inputs from Yogesh in Nagpur)
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