Observing that the arbitrary allocation of a coal block in Giridih, Jharkhand, in 1999 caused huge financial loss to the nation, a Delhi court awarded a three-year prison sentence to former Union minister Dilip Ray.
Besides Ray, who was Minister of State for Coal in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government, Special Judge Bharat Parashar handed three-year jail terms to two senior officials of the ministry at that time — Pradip Kumar Banerjee and Nitya Nand Gautam — and Castron Technologies Ltd (CTL) director Mahendra Kumar Agarwalla.
While sentencing Ray, the special CBI court observed that he had “abused his official position” as his decision of “relaxation of policy without any logical or legal basis amounts to gross abuse of his powers…”
