A Nagpur court on Friday sentenced senior Congress MLA Sunil Kedar and five others to five years rigorous imprisonment after finding them guilty in the Nagpur District Central Cooperative Bank (NDCCB) scam of around Rs 150 crore.
Along with Kedar, who was the then NDCCB Chairman, others convicted in the case are: Ketan Sheth, Nandkishore Trivedi, Ashok Chaudhary, Subodh Bhandari – all from Mumbai, and Amit Verma of Ahmedabad.
Besides, the five-year sentence on various counts, Kedar has also been slapped with a fine of Rs 10 lakh by Additional Chief Judicial Magistrate Jyoti Pekhale-Purkar.
Shortly after the verdict in the politically sensitive trial, formalities were initiated to arrest Kedar and send him to jail, while legal sources said that Kedar will challenge the verdict in the Bombay High Court, which is going on a Christmas vacation from December 25 to January 1, 2024.
The development has come as an embarrassment and shock for the state Opposition ahead of the election year, as Kedar -- an MLA from Saoner -- had served as a Congress minister in the erstwhile Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) regime comprising Shiv Sena (UBT) and Nationalist Congress Party (SP), headed by former CM Uddhav Thackeray.
Worried sources in the Congress pointed out that in case the firebrand Kedar fails to secure a stay order on his conviction, he faces the prospects of being unseated as Saoner MLA and would be debarred from contesting future elections till he is completely cleared of all charges.
ACJM Pekhale-Purkar has acquitted another three accused in the case involving political bigwigs that continued for nearly 21 years from 2002, while some other related cases are still pending in different states.
The sentencing came after heated arguments between the prosecution and defence teams on the quantum of punishment to be awarded to all the convicts, where Kedar's lawyers pleaded for leniency as he is an elected public representative.
Kedar, who had been arrested in the same earlier, and others remained present along with their legal teams in the packed courtroom under tight security as the court pronounced its guilty verdict on the six accused and acquitted three others.
Among various charges, Kedar and others have been convicted of flouting norms by diverting the cooperative bank's funds mostly belonging to farmers, to several private entities for purchasing government securities which led to substantial losses to the NDCCB, in 2001-2002.
Some of the companies which had allegedly benefited included Home Trade Ltd., Indramani Merchants Pvt. Ltd., Syndicate Management Services, Century Dealers Pvt. Ltd., Giltej Management Services, which failed to deliver the government securities to the NDCCB and it incurred huge losses.
The local police probe found that these companies neither delivered the stocks nor made any refund of the monies due to the bank, after which the case was transferred to the state Crime Investigation Department (CID) which filed its charge-sheet in November 2002.
(With inputs from IANS)
