Former union minister Dilip Ray was sentenced to a three-year jail term by a Delhi court on Monday in a coal scam case pertaining to irregularities in the allocation of a Jharkhand coal block in 1999. Ray was Minister of State (coal) in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government. According to reports, Ray was immediately granted bail.
Special Judge Bharat Parashar also awarded three-year jail terms to two senior officials of the Ministry of Coal at that time, Pradip Kumar Banerjee and Nitya Nand Gautam, and Castron Technologies Ltd's (CTL) director Mahendra Kumar Agarwalla. The court also imposed a fine of Rs 10 lakh on each one of them. The court further imposed a Rs. 60 lakh fine on Castron Technologies Ltd's (CLT) and Rs 10 lakh fine on Castron Mining Ltd (CML), also held guilty in the case.