4-year jail term to Gondwana Ispat Dir in coal scam case

A special court today awarded four-year jail term to the director of Gondwana Ispat Ltd in a coal scam case relating to the allocation of a coal block in Maharashtra.

Special CBI Judge Bharat Parashar, who is exclusively dealing with coal scam cases, also imposed a fine of Rs 1 crore on its director Ashok Daga and Rs 60 lakh on the firm.

Daga has been in custody since April 27 after the court had held that he and the company were guilty of cheating and criminal conspiracy to get the Majra coal block in Maharashtra allocated to it.

The director and the company were convicted under sections 120-B (criminal conspiracy) and 420 (cheating) of the IPC and also for the substantive offence under section 420 of the IPC.

Gondwana Ispat Ltd (GIL) was allocated the Majra coal block in 2003 and an FIR was lodged against it in 2014.

The CBI had alleged in the chargesheet that it had found during the probe that Daga had made "unsubstantiated claim even towards the financial preparedness and the tie-up regarding iron ore with Odisha government".

It had alleged that as the Ministry of Coal (MOC) then was not following any system of checking the information provided by an applicant company, GIL and Daga in furtherance of a criminal conspiracy had misrepresented to various government authorities and induced them to reserve or allocate the Majra coal block in their favour.

According to the CBI, on April 22, 2000, Daga had applied to the MoC for allotment of the Ekarjuna Extension coal block in Maharashtra to set up a washery cum sponge iron plant of 60,000 tonne per year capacity in Warora area. This application was rejected.

On September 25, 2001, Daga applied for allotment of Warora West coal block in Maharashtra to set up 1.2 lakh tonne per annum washery cum sponge iron plant. the CBI alleged that in continuation of its earlier application, GIL requested MoC to consider the allotment of Majra-Belgaon coal blocks, having extractable reserve of 8 to 10 million tonnes as an alternate to the Warora North coal block.

MoC, in its 18th Screening Committee meeting held on May 5, 2003, considered the application of M/s GIL and Chandrapur Ispat Ltd for allocation of Majra-Belgaon coal block.

The agency had said that based on the documents and representation submitted by the company, the ministry on October 29, 2003, reserved Majra coal block for M/s GIL subject to certain conditions.

CBI had alleged that during the probe it was found that though after allocation of the coal block in 2003 Daga had filed an undertaking to MOC that he will install a plant or carry out its extension and develop the coal mine, he sold off the company to Nand Kishore Sarda while earning huge profit in October 2005.

(PTI)