Coal news and updates

Former minister of state for coal puts coalgate blame on Manmohan

Former minister of state for coal Dasari Narayan Rao,an accused in Jharkhand's Amarkonda Murgadangal coal block allocation scam, on Tuesday reiterated that it was former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who was heading the coal ministry at that time and took decisions of allocation.

Rao spoke outside the Patiala House court after attending a hearing in the case in which former Jharkhand chief minister Madhu Koda and Congress leader and industrialist Naveen Jindal, along with some others are accused.

Earlier, Rao's counsel had contended in a special court, which just hears coal scam cases, that it was Singh who took the final decision on allocation of coal blocks. "I was only the minister of state. All powers for allocating coal blocks are of the coal minister and the then coal minister was Manmohan Singh," Rao told reporters. The case pertains to alleged irregularities in allocation of Amarkonda Murgadangal coal block to two Jindal group companies—Jindal Steel and Power Ltd (JSPL) and Gagan Sponge Iron Pvt Ltd (GSIPL). The special court had earlier summoned Manmohan Singh and others as accused in a separate coal block allocation case. The summoning order was later stayed by the Supreme Court.

The special court on Tuesday directed CBI to supply copies of documents filed by it to the accused. Special CBI Judge Bharat Parashar passed the direction after some of the accused, including Jindal, informed it that they carried out a partial scrutiny of documents supplied to them by the CBI and some of the documents were either missing or were not legible. The court fixed July 13 for scrutiny of documents in the case.

source: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com