Former Gujarat IAS Officer Gets 5 Years In Jail In 2004 Corruption Case

A sessions court on Monday sentenced former IAS officer Pradeep Sharma to five years in jail and fined him Rs 75,000 in a corruption case dating back to 2004 when he was the collector of Kutch district in Gujarat.

The court of principal district and sessions judge KM Sojitra convicted him in a case registered by Anti Corruption Bureau (ACB) pertaining to the allotment of a piece of land to Welspun Group at a price that allegedly caused a loss of Rs 1.2 crore to the government exchequer.

The court found Mr Sharma guilty section 13 (2) (criminal misconduct by a public servant) and section 11 (public servants obtaining an undue advantage without consideration) of the Prevention of Corruption Act.

He was sentenced to five years in jail and fined Rs 50,000 fine under section 13(2), and given a three year sentence and fine of Rs 25,000 under section 11, public prosecutor Kalpesh Goswami said, adding both the sentences will run concurrently.

Mr Sharma is currently lodged in a jail in Bhuj in another corruption case.

The court conducted a joint trial for three corruption cases related to the allotment of land to the Welspun Group, Goswami said.

As per the case detail, Mr Sharma had allotted land to the company at a price which was 25 percent of the prevailing rate, causing a loss to the government exchequer.

In return, the Welspun Group allegedly made Mr Sharma’s wife a 30 per cent partner in Value Packaging, one of its subsidiaries, and extended her a benefit of Rs 29.5 lakh.

Mr Sharma was arrested by ACB on September 30, 2014 for allegedly accepting Rs 29 lakh bribe from the private company when he was the collector of Kutch in 2004.

Mr Sharma, who is facing several corruption cases, had been at loggerheads with the state government when it was headed by Narendra Modi.

He had sought a CBI probe into alleged snooping on a woman architect after two news portals released CDs of purported telephonic conversations between Union Home Minister Amit Shah, who was then Gujarat’s minister of state for home, and two top state police officials.

The conversations, purportedly between August and September 2009, referred to a ‘saheb’, which portals alleged was the then Gujarat CM at whose instance snooping was done, a charge denied by Shah.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)