Five companies and their directors and unknown public servants have been booked by the Central Bureau of Investigation in five cases for allegedly entering into a conspiracy to misrepresent facts and furnish documents showing inflated “net worth” figures to secure allocation of coal blocks in Maharashtra, Jharkhand, Odisha and Chhattisgarh.
The CBI named Congress MP Vijay Darda in one of the cases and conducted searches at 30 places in 11 cities on Tuesday. Cases were registered against AMR Iron & Steel Private Limited (Nagpur), JLD Yavatmal Energy Limited (Nagpur) in which Mr. Darda is a director, Navbharat Power Private Limited (Hyderabad), Vini Iron & Steel Udyog Limited (Kolkata) and JAS Infrastructure Capital Private Limited (Kolkata) and their 20 directors, besides government officials for conniving with these companies. The CBI alleged that the promoters of some of these companies sold their stakes in an “irregular manner” after the allocation of coal blocks.
Yavatmal, AMR and JAS Infrastructure, alleged to have a common promoter, and their directors were accused of making false claims in applications seeking allocations and misrepresenting “net worth” figures by including equities of some companies with whom they had purportedly entered into an agreement for short durations. Yavatmal was allocated the Fatehpur East coal block in Chhattisgarh, AMR the Bandel block (Maharashtra) and JAS Infrastructure the Mahuagarhi block (Jharkhand). The CBI detected that Navbharat Power — which was allocated Rampia and Dip Side of Rampia coal blocks in Odisha — purportedly misrepresented its financial strength by including an approved bank loan amount and misrepresented about the other companies supporting the projects.
