Former Union Minister Dilip Ray was sentenced Monday to three years in prison in a coal scam case. Ray was convicted in the case concerning irregularities in the allocation of a Jharkhand coal block in 1999.
A Delhi court earlier this month reserved the warrant for October 26 after hearing arguments from the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and the convicts. The court ordered the convicts to physically appear before it on that date.
In addition to Ray, a former minister of state (coal) in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government, the IWC had requested life imprisonment for other convicts: two senior officials from the Ministry of Coal at the time, Pradip Kumar Banerjee and Nitya Nand Gautam, and Castron Technologies Ltd (CTL), Mahendra Kumar Agarwalla.
Ray was convicted under several sections, including 409 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), which deals with criminal abuse of trust by a public servant.
“I am very surprised by the conviction under section 409 of the IPC, as the same court in the past has acquitted people in the 409 IPC in light of the sentencing of three judges of the Supreme Court. However, I welcome the non-harsh three-year sentence imposed by the court, ”said Vijay Aggarwal, a lawyer who represented several defendants in 2G scam and also represents several defendants in scam cases. Coal.
This was the first conviction in the coal scam.
The judge had said that Ray “dishonestly facilitated the allocation of the abandoned non-nationalized coal mining area in favor of CTL and that also in violation of the direction of the law.”
The case concerns the assignment of the Brahmadiha coal block at Giridih in Jharkhand to CTL in 1999.
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