Former Union minister Dilip Ray was on Monday, 26 October, sentenced to three years in jail by a Delhi court in a case related to irregularities in Jharkhand coal block allocation in 1999.
However, shortly after his conviction, the CBI court granted bail to Ray and the others on a bail bond of Rs 1 lakh each. The court has also granted them time till 25 November to appeal in the high court, ANI reported.
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 and its director Mahendra Kumar Agarwalla, and Castron Mining Limited, had also been found guilty, with the special CBI court also awarding three-year jail terms to them.
The judge also imposed a fine of Rs 10 lakh on them, Rs 60 lakh on Castron Technologies Limited and Rs 10 lakh on Castron Mining Limited, IANS reported.
The former Minister of State (MoS) for Coal in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government and five others were convicted in the case on 6 October, with the court noting that they conspired together, beyond all reasonable doubt, to procure allocation of the coal block.
The case pertains to the allocation of 105.153 hectares of non-nationalised and abandoned coal mining area in Jharkhand’s Giridih district to Castron Technologies Limited by the 14th Screening Committee of the Ministry of Coal in 1999.
(With inputs from PTI, IANS and ANI.)
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