Lucknow, Oct 3 (PTI) The Allahabad High Court on Tuesday rejected a plea against its order directing the CBI to conduct a preliminary enquiry into the recent recruitment of staff in the UP legislature.

"We want to place the entire material before the HC but do not want to face CBI as it is a hounding probe agency," senior advocate JN Mathur, appearing as a special counsel on behalf of the Legislative Council, told a Lucknow bench of the high court.

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The bench of justices AR Masoodi and Om Prakash Shukla passed the order on the review application moved by the Legislative Council through its counsel Akansha Dubey.

The bench did not pay any heed to the state's request that instead of the CBI, the inquiry by a retired high court judge may be ordered.

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The high court said that it would issue detailed reasons later for rejecting the plea.

The CBI has registered a preliminary enquiry into the matter.

The plea said that the bench should review its order because if a proper opportunity of hearing was given, documents would have been placed by the administration to the satisfaction of the court that no criminal offence was made out for which the CBI inquiry was needed.

"Alleged irregularity or illegality does not mean that there was any criminal offence made out in the matter, necessitating to rush to a CBI-like agency," Mathur added.

Meanwhile, Sandeep Dixit, representing the state government, urged the bench that it should direct an inquiry into the matter by a committee headed by a retired high court judge instead of the CBI.

He said a retired judge would be in a better position to make an inquiry about illegalities in the recruitment, if any.

After hearing the matter at length, the bench rejected the review application and said that it would give reasons later. "There is no good ground to review the earlier order," said the bench.

The high court had on September 18 expressed serious displeasure on the fairness of examinations conducted for filling vacancies of different staff in the Legislative Assembly and Legislative Council.

Recording its dissatisfaction, the bench had directed the CBI to conduct a preliminary enquiry to primarily find out as to whether there was any foul play in the recruitments.

The bench asked the CBI to place before it the preliminary enquiry report by the first week of November.

It had passed the order, registering a suo-motu PIL, in the course of hearing two petitions.

(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)