Former MLA & Samajwadi Party leader Mukesh Srivastava, and his brother have been booked for allegedly duping a man by promising him a job at a yet-to-be built medical college in Payagpur in Bahraich, police said on Tuesday.

The allegation has been levelled against Mukesh Srivastava and his brother Balendra Srivastava, whose wife Parul Srivastava is contesting the upcoming civic polls for the post of chairperson in the Payagpur Nagar Panchayat.

Mukesh, who was earlier a Congress MLA from Payagpur and had joined the Samajwadi Party in 2016 when he and his wife Pooja Srivastava were facing a probe by the Central Bureau of Investigation in the multi-crore National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) scam.

In the fresh case, Payagpur Station House Officer (SHO) Rajkumar Pandey said an FIR under Sections 420/206 & 506 of Indian Penal Code were registered against Mukesh and Balendra on Monday. The case was registered based on a complaint given by Brijesh Kumar Singh, who alleged that Rs 5 lakh was demanded from him for a job in the medical college and he gave Rs 50,000 to Mukesh Srivastava, according to the police.

Singh said that the Uttar Pradesh government had not yet given approval to the former MLA to build the medical college, and hence when he demanded his money back, he was shooed away.

Mukesh Srivastava had laid the foundation for Babu Bachchu Lal Institute of Medical Sciences which was proposed to be built at a cost of Rs 400 crore.

It may be mentioned that during the NRHM probe in 2014, the then Congress legislator from Payagpur in Bahraich, Mukesh Srivastava, and his wife Pooja Srivastava were declared absconders and notices of their non-bailable warrants (NBWs) were pasted outside their residence by the sleuths of the Central Bureau of Investigation.

Both Mukesh and Pooja were allegedly involved in the multi-crore scam in the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM), and they were not turning up before the CBI, following which a court declared them absconders.

The CBI had later arrested Mukesh and two of his family members, who were lodged at Dasna jail in Ghaziabad. 

Besides Mukesh, the CBI had also arrested a former minister in Mayawati government, Babu Singh Kushwaha, then MLA RP Jaiswal, and ex-principal secretary (health and family welfare) Pradeep Shukla besides many other senior officers and doctors  in the NRHM scam.

According to sources,  large-scale irregularities galore in the supply of medicines and equipment in large quantities by the firm owned by Pooja Srivastava. In 2012, CBI had lodged a case of cheating, forgery, and criminal conspiracy against Mukesh and his wife. Later in an effort to come out clean, they left Congress and joined the then ruling Samajwadi Party in 2016. However, Mukesh lost the assembly election to a BJP candidate in 2017.