NEW DELHI: The Delhi High Court on Tuesday suspended the three-year jail term of former Union minister Dilip Ray in a coal scam case pertaining to irregularities in the allocation of a Jharkhand block in 1999. According to a lawyer associated with the case, Justice Suresh Kumar Kait also issued notice to the CBI and sought its response on the appeal filed by Ray, challenging his sentencing in the case.
The High Court admitted the appeal and listed it for further hearing on November 25, the lawyer said. The trial court had sentenced Ray, the 68-year old former minister of state (coal) in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government, to three-year in jail and also imposed a fine of Rs 10 lakh on him.
Besides him, the trial court has also awarded three-year jail term each to two senior officials of the ministry at that time -- Pradip Kumar Banerjee and Nitya Nand Gautam, both about 80-year-old. It has also awarded the same jail term to Castron Technologies Ltd (CTL) director Mahendra Kumar Agarwalla (75). The trial court had however granted bail to the convict persons for one month to enable them to approach the high court challenging the verdict.
It had imposed a fine of Rs 2 lakh each on Banerjee and Gautam, while Agarwalla was asked to pay a fine of Rs 60 lakh. It had also imposed a fine of Rs 60 lakh and Rs 10 lakh on CTL and Castron Mining Ltd (CML) respectively. The two firms were also held guilty in the case.
The convicts had urged the trial court to take a lenient view considering their old age and that they were never convicted earlier. The CBI, represented by public prosecutors V K Sharma and A P Singh in the trial court, however, had sought maximum punishment for the convicts.