The case covers the period when Congress MP and former bureaucrat P L Punia was managing director of the corporation.

In all, loans totalling Rs 120 crore were sanctioned to 27 companies which, the investigation showed, did not exist.

While accepting the EOW application, Judicial Magistrate Abid Shamim on Thursday ordered that the investigation should be assigned to an officer above the rank of a deputy SP.

The EOW, which had filed charge-sheets against the defaulters in 2004, sought a reinvestigation after the present MD of PICUP Archana Agrawal sent a letter to the state government recommending a fresh probe.

No officer of PICUP is named in the charge-sheets, sources said.  

Sources in the Home Department said the EOW has been asked to first probe the case against Manu and Companies, owned by Sant Ram Aditya and his associates of Delhi. Sant Ram, as managing director of the company, had borrowed Rs 7 crore during Punia’s tenure in 1989-90, sources said.

Punia, who had served as principal secretary to the chief ministers like Mulayam Singh Yadav and Mayawati, is presently the Congress MP from Barabanki.

An officer who had initially supervised the probe said Sant Ram had obtained the loans against properties he claimed he owned at various places, including Nainital and Haldwani (both now in Uttarakhand), Rampur, Moradabad and Kanpur Dehat.

The officer said the PICUP did not get an on-the-spot verification of the lands done before sanctioning the loans. When the process of recovery of the loans began, the notices PICUP sent started coming back as the addresses mentioned in the documents did not exist.

The EOW, which was handed over the probe in 2001, too found the companies did not exist at the given addresses, sources said.

When contacted, Punia said, “I have read about it in the newspapers. Mayawati is acting with a vengeance.

She has a destructive mind and cannot see other Dalits excel in life. She is troubled to see me becoming one of the Dalit leaders and the Congress party getting Dalit vote share.”

“There has been investigation into the case twice in the past, but my name neverfigured. Now, she wants to re-open the case so that she can manipulate it to frame me,” he added.