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HomeCrimeFormer Union Minister Dilip Ray Sentenced to 3-Year Jail for Coal Scam

Former Union Minister Dilip Ray Sentenced to 3-Year Jail for Coal Scam

New Delhi: Former Union Minister Dilip Ray was sentenced to 3-years jail in a coal block allocation case by a Special CBI court on Monday. In 1999, Ray was the Minister in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government.

This case relates to the allocation of  105.153 hectares of abandoned and non-nationalized coal mining areas in the Jharkhand’s Giridih district in favor of Castron Technologies Limited by the 14th Screening Committee of the Ministry of Coal in 1999.

Nitya Nand Gautam and Pradip Kumar Banerjee, the two senior officials of the Ministry of Coal at that time, and Castron Technologies Limited’s Director Mahendra Kumar Agarwalla were also awarded three years term each by Special Judge Bharat Parashar. Earlier, The CBI had asked the court to award life imprisonment to Dilip Ray and other convicts to give a message to society as white-collar crimes are on the rise.

The court had been requested by the convicts to take a lenient view in respect to their prior clean antecedents and also of their old age. The court had convicted them in the case on October 6, noting that they conspired together beyond shadows of all reasonable doubts to procure allocation of the coal block.

Aside from Ray,  two former senior officials of the Ministry of Coal — the then Additional Secretary Pradip Kumar Banerjee and Nitya Nand Gautam, former advisor (Projects), Castron Technologies Limited, its director Mahendra Kumar Agarwalla and Castron Mining Limited have likewise been found guilty.

They were held guilty by the court for the offenses 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.

Aside from this, Castron Technologies Limited, Mahesh Kumar Agarwalla, and Castron Mining Limited were likewise found guilty for the offense under  34 (common intention) and 379 (punishment for theft)of the Indian Penal Code.

Up to 51 witnesses were investigated in the case. The prosecution had opposed 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 engaged in the process of allocation of impugned coal block.

It was discovered that the Brahmadiha coal block was not a nationalized coal mine and was not included by CIL or its subsidiary companies in the identified list of captive coal blocks to be allotted by the Ministry of Coal. The Brahmadiha coal block was not an identified captive coal block to be allocated to private parties, even the screening committee was not competent enough to consider its allocation to any organization much less to Castron Technologies Limited.

The prosecution furthermore said that Ray himself had permitted the rules of the Coal

Ministry that no coal block shall be allotted for captive mining to a company involved in the production of iron and steel or sponge iron if the annual production capacity is less than one MTPA in opencast mining but when it came to Castron Technologies Limited, he agreed to relax the said guidelines so as to extend undue benefits to the private parties involved.

 

source: with input from ians