Coal scam: Court directs CBI to supply documents to accused

A special court today directed CBI to supply all deficient papers to the accused in a coal block allocation scam case in which former Coal Secretary H C Gupta and others were summoned.
Special CBI Judge Bharat Parashar also allowed the plea of defence counsel to inspect the documents of the case.
During the hearing, Senior Public Prosecutor A P Singh filed a consolidated list of documents and statements being relied upon by the CBI and said these have been supplied to the accused.
Counsel for the accused however raised objection and said that in the consolidated list, several documents and the corresponding seizure memos were still not available.

To this, the court directed the Investigating Officer to supply deficient documents to the accused and fixed the case for October 29 for further scrutiny of documents.
On September 9, the court had directed the CBI to supply all documents to the accused after they had objected that while 241 documents were mentioned in the list supplied to them, the agency had given them only 163 documents.

The case pertains to alleged irregularities in allocation of Rampia and dip side of Rampia coal block in Odisha to M/s Navbharat Power Pvt Ltd (NPPL), now known as Brahmani Thermal Power Pvt Ltd (BTPPL), in January 2008.

Besides Gupta, two senior public servants, K S Kropha and K C Samria, BTPPL's chairman, P Trivikrama Prasad and its vice chairman Y Harish Chandra Prasad are accused in the case along with the firm. These accused are presently out on bail.
The court had summoned these accused for alleged offences under sections 120-B (criminal conspiracy), 409 (criminal breach of trust by public servants) and 420 (cheating) of IPC and under the provisions of the Prevention of Corruption Act.
Kropha was the then Joint Secretary of Ministry of Coal (MoC), while Samria was then the Director (Coal Allocation-I section) there.

CBI had earlier filed a charge sheet against NPPL, P Trivikrama Prasad and Y Harish Chandra Prasad for the alleged offences of criminal conspiracy and cheating under the IPC and had subsequently said in its final report that no offence was found to be committed by the public servants.