Devendra Fadnavis admits in court inadvertent mistake on part of his lawyer in non-disclosure of cases in poll affidavit

Maharashtra state deputy chief minister Devendra Fadnavis has admitted  before a court in Nagpur that there had been an inadvertent mistake while collating information about pending criminal cases against him due to which two criminal matters were not mentioned in his election affidavit submitted in 2014.

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader and MLA from Nagpur said he had asked his advocate Uday Dable to collect details about pending criminal cases ahead of Assembly elections and there seems to have been an error on the advocate’s part in collation of the required information.

Fadnavis (52), in an explanatory statement submitted to Civil Judge V M Deshmukh on April 15, said there was no intention to deliberately conceal information about the two insignificant complaint cases and their non-inclusion in the poll affidavit of Form 26 was sheer inadvertence and without any intention.

Fadnavis, in his statement, said when elections for the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly were declared in 2014, he was the state BJP president and was shouldering the responsibility of overseeing electioneering in all constituencies (numbering 288) of the state.

I say that 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 the collation of information inadvertently left out two complaint cases and therefore only 22 criminal cases were mentioned in the affidavit, the statement said.

I say that 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 and without any intention, it added.

I, therefore, most respectfully say that, I had no reason to conceal any information in my nomination paper or in the documents accompanying it, Fadnavis said in the statement.

Advocate Dable reiterated he had made an inadvertent mistake while collating information about the number of criminal cases pending against Fadnavis.

In his statement, the advocate claimed while filling the form he had mentioned 22 pending criminal cases against Fadnavis, but missed out on two pending matters.