The CBI on Monday filed its first charge sheet in the coal blocks’ allocation scam against Hyderabad Navabharat Power Pvt ltd and its two directors for allegedly misrepresenting facts and making fraudulent claims regarding net worth to get coal block between 2006 and 2009.
The agency, however, failed in nailing the “unknown” public servants named in the FIR for commission of offences including cheating, criminal conspiracy and under relevant sections of the Prevention of Corruption Act. The agency has been probing the case for the last over 18 months. Besides Navabharat Power Pvt ltd, company chairman P Trivikrama Prasad and vice chairman and managing director Y Harish Chandra Prasad were named in the charge sheet, that was filed before special CBI judge Madhu Jain.
“The role of public servants in the case is under further investigation,” the sources said. The case against Navbharat and its chairman and vice chairman on September 3, 2012 for allegedly “embellishing” the net worth of the company by quoting the net worth of global giants Globeleq and Suez Energy International without legal basis, during the coal block allocation process and showed its financial worth to a whopping one lakh crore, the sources said.
Two coal blocks — Rampia and Dip-side Rampia — were jointly allocated in October 2008 to Navbharat along with five other companies including Sterlite Energy ltd, GMR Energy ltd, lanco Group ltd, Mittal Steel India ltd and Reliance Energy ltd. CBI sources said Navbharat was worth Rs 22 crore on the eve of its application seeking coal block blocks but offloaded its shares in the company to Essar after getting the blocks. Navbharat made a windfall gain of Rs 208 crore.
CBI had started investigations in June 2012 following allegations of irregularities in allocation of coal blocks to private companies between 2006 and 2009. It is also probing allocations between 1993 and 2004. In its FIR, the CBI had alleged that unknown officials of the Coal Ministry entered into conspiracy and did not scrutinise the documents “wilfully to allow undue advantage to the company in getting the blocks. The agency has so far registered 16 FIRs relating alleged irregular allotment of coal blocks, mostly during the UPA-I and UPA-II regimes.