The court will hear the matter on November 25 (Archive)
New Delhi:
The Delhi High Court on Tuesday suspended a three-year prison sentence awarded to former union minister Dilip Ray in a case involving irregularities in the allocation of Jharkhand coal blocks in 1999. Judge Suresh Kumar Kait has sent a notice to the CBI to request your response on appeal against your conviction.
The court admitted its appeal in the matter and listed the case for a further hearing on November 25, the PTI news agency reported.
Dilip Ray, the former minister of state (coal) in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government, was convicted last month of the case. The CBI had requested life imprisonment for him and two other convicts, arguing that the maximum sentence should be awarded to send a message to society.
The convicts had urged the court to adopt a lenient attitude in light of their old age and that they had never been convicted before.
In addition to him, the court had also awarded a three-year prison term to each of two senior ministry officials at the time: Pradip Kumar Banerjee and Nitya Nand Gautam, both in their 80s. It also granted the same prison sentence to the director of Castron Technologies Ltd (CTL), Mahendra Kumar Agarwalla (75).
However, the court of first instance granted the convicts a bail of one month so that they could go to the higher court challenging the verdict.
In announcing the sentence, the court of first instance had said that it “dishonestly facilitated the allocation of the abandoned non-nationalized coal mining zone in favor of CTL and that also violated the direction of the law.”
The case concerns the assignment of the Brahmadiha coal block at Giridih in Jharkhand to CTL in 1999.
With PTI inputs
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