A Delhi court held Dilip Ray, former Minister of State (MoS) for Coal and five others 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 and reserved the orders on the sentencing in the coal block allocation case for October 26. The case is related to allocation of 105 hectares of non-nationalized and abandoned coal mining area in Jharkhand’s Giridih district to Castron Technologies Limited by 14th Screening Committee of Ministry of Coal in 1999. Earlier Special Judge Bharat Parashar had convicted them in the case, stating that there were no doubts that the six had conspired together to procure allocation of the coal block.
Two former senior officials of the Ministry of Coal – Pradip Kumar Banerjee, the then Additional Secretary and Nitya Nand Gautam, former advisor (Projects), and Castron Technologies Limited, its director Mahendra Kumar Agarwalla and Castron Mining Limited have also been found guilty under 379 (punishment for theft) and 34 (common intention) of the Indian Penal Code. The arguments on the quantum of sentence will be heard by the court on October 14. 51 witnesses were examined in the case and as per the prosecution, facts and circumstances pointed to a criminal conspiracy by private parties and public servants involved in the process of allocation of the coal block.
The submission stated 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. It was mentioned that the screening committee was not competent to consider its allocation to any company and that Dilip Ray had himself approved the guidelines of 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 annual production capacity of the company is less than 1 MTPA in opencast mining. In case of Castron Technologies Limited, he agreed to relax the guidelines to extend undue benefits to the private parties involved.
