New Delhi (ILNS): Dilip Ray, a Union minister in the earlier NDA government, was today sentenced to three-year imprisonment by a Special CBI Court in Delhi in a 1999 coal scam case. The case pertains to irregularities in the allocation of a Jharkhand coal block.
This is the first conviction of a minister in the coal scam. Ray was former minister of state (coal) during the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government.
Special Judge Bharat Parashar also awarded three-year jail terms each to two senior officials of the Ministry of Coal at that time, Pradip Kumar Banerjee and Nitya Nand Gautam and Castron Technologies Limited (CTL) director Mahendra Kumar Agarwalla.
Fines of Rs 10 lakh have also been imposed on each of them.