Coal allocation: Manmohan Singh took ‘ultimate decision’, says ex-coal secy

The court has fixed the case for May 29 when CBI’s prosecutor will rebut the arguments of the accused.

Former Coal Secretary H C Gupta, an accused in a coal block allocation case, said Wednesday that it was former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, then coal minister, who took the “ultimate decision” of allocating the coal block.

The submissions were made by Gupta, during arguments on the framing of charges in a case pertaining to alleged irregularities in the allocation of Jharkhand’s Rajhara North coal block.

Arguing that Singh was the “competent authority” in the allocation of the coal block, Gupta said the secretary of a ministry was only an advisor to the minister-in-charge and it was the minister who took the final decision. “The ultimate power to allocate coal blocks was with then PM (Singh), who was also Coal Minister at that time,” Gupta’s counsel told Special CBI Judge Bharat Parashar.

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Gupta argued that as a chairman of the screening committee, he was empowered to only “recommend” allocation of blocks and that he sent the recommendation to the then “Coal Minister who after exercising all his wisdom and discretion, decided to allocate (the) coal block to an applicant firm”. “Secretary of Coal Ministry does not have dominion over coal. Union of India was having part dominion (over it). The Coal Minister was having the dominion over the coal blocks,” Gupta’s counsel argued. The court has fixed the case for May 29 when CBI’s prosecutor will rebut the arguments of the accused.

Earlier, former minister Dasari Narayan Rao had also said the decision on final allocation “was taken by the Minister of Coal who was the then Prime Minister”. Rao is an accused in another case relating to allocation of coal block to Congress leader Naveen Jindal-owned firm.

Kaunain Sheriff M

Kaunain Sheriff M is an award-winning investigative journalist and the National Health Editor at The Indian Express. He is the author of Johnson & Johnson Files: The Indian Secrets of a Global Giant, an investigation into one of the world’s most powerful pharmaceutical companies. With over a decade of experience, Kaunain brings deep expertise in three areas of investigative journalism: law, health, and data. He currently leads The Indian Express newsroom’s in-depth coverage of health. His work has earned some of the most prestigious honours in journalism, including the Ramnath Goenka Award for Excellence in Journalism, the Society of Publishers in Asia (SOPA) Award, and the Mumbai Press Club’s Red Ink Award. Kaunain has also collaborated on major global investigations. He was part of the Implant Files project with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), which exposed malpractices in the medical device industry across the world. He also contributed to an international investigation that uncovered how a Chinese big-data firm was monitoring thousands of prominent Indian individuals and institutions in real time. Over the years, he has reported on several high-profile criminal trials, including the Hashimpura massacre, the 2G spectrum scam, and the coal block allocation case. Within The Indian Express, he has been honoured three times with the Indian Express Excellence Award for his investigations—on the anti-Sikh riots, the Vyapam exam scam, and the abuse of the National Security Act in Uttar Pradesh. ... Read More

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