Coal news and updates

The Delhi high court has quashed CBI's chargesheet and investigations against Prakash Industries Ltd in a case relating to allocation of captive coal blocks. 

 

Justice Sunil Gaur on Friday held that the charge leveled by CBI that Prakash Industries Ltd (PIL) conspired with government officials to try and obtain captive coal blocks on the basis of wrong data, can't be established. 

 

Appearing for the industrial house, senior advocate Kapil Sibal and advocate Vijay Aggarwal argued in HC that PIL never hid any facts from the Central government and in fact made full disclosure of its functioning capacity in 2007. 

 

On the basis of CBI's chargesheet a Special Court had in 2012 put Prakash Industry, its director and two officials of a Union steel ministry panel on trial on charges of forgery cheating and corruption in a coal block allocation case. 

 

The CBI claimed executive secretary Goutam Kumar Basak and Manager (F&A) Soumen Chatterjee of the ministry's Joint Plant Committee (JPC) allegedly gave misleading report on production capacity of PIL. The CBI court had framed charges against them under sections 120-B (criminal conspiracy), 420 (cheating), 468 (forgery for the purpose of cheating), 471 (using as genuine a forged document) of the IPC and under the provisions of Prevention of Corruption Act. 

 

According to the CBI, on the basis of inflated production figures and "bogus reports" submitted by PIL, Basak and Chatterjee, the screening committee allotted the captive coal block at Urtan in Madhya Pradesh and at Vijay Central in Chhattisgarh to PIL. The court, in its order on framing of charges against the accused, had also said that Basak and Chatterjee were directed to make physical verification of the PIL's plant, but instead of giving "the correct picture, they gave misleading picture suited to the claim of A K Chaturvedi and PIL." 

 

But HC found that the trial court proceeded to frame charges without material evidence. "To say the least, trial court was not justified to put petitioners on trial, merely because there is confusion about the production capacity of the operating kilns. During the course of hearing, attention of HC was not drawn to any material on record to show that any letter was fabricated by petitioners," Justice Gaur observed. 

 

 

 

Source: ToI