Former Union Minister of State for Coal Dilip Ray became the first minister of the erstwhile NDA government to be summoned as an accused in a coal scam case, with a special court on Monday directing him and five others to appear before it on February 26.
Besides Ray, who was the MoS for Coal in 1999 in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government, the court summoned two senior officials of the Ministry of Coal (MoC) at that time, Pradip Kumar Banerjee and Nitya Nand Gautam as accused. It also summoned Castron Technologies Ltd (CTL), its director Mahendra Kumar Agarwalla and Castron Mining Ltd (CML) as accused in the case. The case pertains to alleged irregularities in the allocation of Brahmadiha coal block at Giridih in Jharkhand to CTL in 1999.
While summoning Ray and the other accused, Special CBI Judge Bharat Parashar noted that the then public servants had prima facie abused their official positions and “there was a concerted effort by way of a criminal conspiracy to facilitate misappropriation of the important nationalised natural resources of the country i.e. coal by M/s CTL and M/s CML.”
The court noted that the accused public servants had “in fact actively connived with the private parties involved to facilitate misappropriation of the nationalised natural resources of the country by them.” Banerjee was the then Additional Secretary in MoC, while Gautam was Advisor (Projects) in the ministry at that time. The accused have been summoned for the alleged offences under Section 120-B, 420 and 409 of the IPC and under relevant provisions of the Prevention of Corruption (PC) Act.