Press Trust of India
Bhubaneswar/Cuttack, Dec 1: A special court Monday convicted a retired IAS officer and sentenced him to 20 months’ imprisonment in a disproportionate assets case.
Special Court Judge Bibhu Prasad Routray convicted the retired officer in the 24-year-old case.
Ramesh Charan Behera, the 1979-batch officer, was charged with possessing disproportionate assets worth Rs 3.48 lakh.
Behera, having retired in April 2010, was also fined Rs 34,800 for possession of disproportionate assets worth Rs 3.48 lakh while working as an Additional Secretary in 1990.
Booked on corruption charges by Cuttack vigilance sleuths, Behera’s house in Berhampur, his father-in-law’s house in Balasore and his official residence in Bhubaneswar were simultaneously searched May 13, 1990 during which the search party detected that the assets in his possession were beyond known sources of his income.
Behera, along with five other All India Services officers, was assigned ‘without duty’ by the state government in May 2006 and charge-sheeted in several corruption cases since.
But Behera and another 1983-batch IAS officer had moved the Central Administrative Tribunal (CAT) against the government order stating that they could not be punished as they had not been convicted.
When the two-member Cuttack bench of CAT was divided in its opinion, the matter was referred to the national Chairman of the Tribunal.
In September 2007, the national Chairman of the Tribunal set aside the state government’s ‘without duty’ order and ordered Behera’s immediate posting as per his seniority notwithstanding the pending trial against him.
During the trial of the case, the authorised officer of the special court had also confiscated a lot of immovable properties of Behera including a farmhouse, ten homestead plots in Ganjam district worth over Rs 4.80 lakh, which were registered in the name of Behera’s wife Bhagyashree.
Attaching the plots in December 2011, the state government is now running a horticulture garden on those properties.