Bhubaneswar: A Vigilance court here on Tuesday awarded three years rigorous imprisonment (RI) to dismissed Odisha-cadre IAS officer Vinod Kumar and two others in connection with a loan fraud case.
This is the 10th consecutive conviction of the former Managing Director of the Orissa Rural Housing Development Corporation (ORHDC) in corruption cases.
The court has also imposed a fine of Rs 25,000 on Kumar and the other two convicts – Purna Chandra Das, former Executive Director, Technical, ORHDC, Bhubaneswar and Subhash Chandra Panda, State Coordinator of Bhubaneswar-based AWARE NGO.
Kumar and Das showed undue official favour to Panda in the matter of illegal sanction and disbursement of loan on the basis of fabricated documents without security, a Vigilance release said.
The 1989-batch IAS officer, one of the key accused in the rural housing scam, was dismissed in 2022 after the Centre approved the state government’s proposal to give him compulsory retirement. As many as 27 graft cases were filed against him.
Kumar is accused of resorting to unfair means to sanction Rs 33.34 crore as the ORHDC managing director after Super Cyclone hit the coastal state in 1999. He granted loans to builders and contractors without obtaining adequate collateral and proper scrutiny during his tenure at the corporation in 2000-01. The loans were meant for reconstructing houses damaged in the 1999 cyclone.
