By Our Correspondent
BHUBANESWAR/NEW DELHI: Veteran Dilip Ray proved mettle again. The former Union Minister , who is heading a 3 years of jail term, on Tuesday got a huge relief with the Delhi High Court suspended the jail term in a coal scam case pertaining to irregularities in the allocation of a Jharkhand block in 1999.
Sources close to the development, quoting a lawyer associated with the case, Justice Suresh Kumar Kait also issued notice to the CBI and sought its response on the appeal filed by Ray, challenging his conviction and sentence in the case. The high court has listed the matter for further hearing on November 25.
The trial court had on Monday sentenced Ray, the 68-year old former minister of state (coal) in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government, to three-year in jail and also imposed a fine of Rs 10 lakh on him.
Earlier, Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) court on Monday (October 26) granted bail to former Union Minister Dilip Ray and 2 others, convicted in the coal scam case and heading a three-year jail term.The CBI court granted bail to all of them on a bond of Rs 1 lakh each. Ray was Minister of State (coal) in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government. The three were also given time till November 25 to appeal in the High Court.
Former Union Minister Dilip Ray was accused of corruption in the Brahmadiha coal mine allocation in Giridih, Jharkhand, in 1999. In this case, along with Dilip Ray, three other convicts have also been proved guilty. On October 6, the special CBI court had considered all the accused as convicted and postponed the verdict till further hearing.
The case pertains to allocation of 105.153 hectares of non-nationalised and abandoned coal mining area in Jharkhand’s Giridih district in favour of Castron Technologies Limited by 14th Screening Committee of the Ministry of Coal in 1999.Besides Ray, two former senior officials of the Ministry of Coal — Pradip Kumar Banerjee, the then Additional Secretary and Nitya Nand Gautam, former advisor (Projects), Castron Technologies Limited, its director Mahendra Kumar Agarwalla and Castron Mining Limited have also been found guilty.The CBI Court had on October 6 convicted Ray, who was the Minister of State (MoS) for Coal in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government, and five others in the coal block allocation case.
The court held them guilty of offences under 120-B (criminal conspiracy) 409 (criminal breach of trust) and 420 (cheating) of the Indian Penal Code and various sections of the Prevention of Corruption Act. Besides this, Mahesh Kumar Agarwalla and Castron Mining Limited were also held guilty for the offence under 379 (punishment for theft) and 34 (common intention) of the Indian Penal Code. As many as 51 witnesses were examined in the case.
In this case, former Jharkhand Chief Minister Madhu Koda has been proved guilty. He was fined Rs 25 lakh with three years in jail. Similarly, former mining secretary HC Gupta was also jailed for three years and fined Rs 1 lakh.
Special Judge Bharat Parashar also awarded three years term each to two senior officials of the Ministry of Coal at that time — Pradip Kumar Banerjee and Nitya Nand Gautam — and Castron Technologies Limited’s Director Mahendra Kumar Agarwalla. The CBI had earlier urged the court to award life imprisonment to Ray and other convicts to send a message to the society as white-collar crimes were on the rise. The court further imposed Rs 60 lakh on CLT.
The prosecution had argued that the facts and circumstances of the case clearly pointed to the hatching of a criminal conspiracy by the private parties and the public servants involved in the process of allocation of impugned coal block.
It was submitted that Brahmadiha coal block was not a nationalised coal mine and was not included by CIL or its subsidiary companies in the identified list of captive coal blocks to be allocated by the Ministry of Coal.Senior Public Prosecutor A.P. Singh had told the court that as Brahmadiha coal block was not an identified captive coal block to be allocated to private parties, even the screening committee was not competent to consider its allocation to any company much less to Castron Technologies Limited.
The prosecution further stated that Dilip Ray had himself approved the guidelines of the Coal Ministry that no coal block shall be allocated for captive mining to a company engaged in production of iron and steel or sponge iron if the annual production capacity is less than one MTPA in opencast mining but in the case of Castron Technologies Limited, he agreed to relax the said guidelines so as to extend undue benefits to the private parties involved.
