Former Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer Pradeep Sharma was sentenced to five years’ rigorous imprisonment on Saturday in a case related to the irregularities of allocating government land in 2011 in Kutch district in Gujarat. The case is of 2004, during Sharma’s tenure as the district collector of Kutch, land was allotted to a private company, Saw Pipes Pvt Ltd, which caused a big loss to the exchequer in the state.
The verdict was pronounced by Additional Chief Judicial Magistrate JV Buddha at Bhuj. They all were convicted, together with urban planner Natubhai Desai, then mamlatdar Narendra Prajapati, and then resident deputy collector Ajitsinh Zala. Five years’ rigorous imprisonment and a fine of Rs 10,000 each are awarded to each of the accused.
The court, however, pointed out that if Sharma does not get over with the year sentence handed out by a sessions court in Ahmedabad in another 2004 corruption case by then, his sentence in this case would begin.
In this land allotment, the FIR was registered in 2011 in the First Information Report (FIR) at the CID Crime Rajkot zone police station. Sections 409 (criminal breach of trust by a public servant), 120B (criminal conspiracy), and 217 (public servant disobeying direction of law with intent to save person from punishment) of the Indian Penal Code were on which the accused were charged. Sharma was arrested on March 4, 2011.
The Gujarat court notes and the testimonies of 18 prosecution witnesses had been taken into account by 52 pieces of documentary evidence by the court before it delivered the judgment, said special public prosecutor H.B. Jadeja.
This conviction joins the legal casework against Sharma, who once rose high in Gujarat’s bureaucracy, now dogged with cases in which he is accused of corruption.
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