New Delhi: A special CBI court in Delhi has acquitted former Union minister Subodh Kant Sahay’s brother and others in the coal block allocation case, strongly criticizing the prosecution’s investigation and evidence.The former minister’s brother, Sudhir Kumar Sahay, was one of the directors of SKS Ispat and Power Ltd, an accused in the case.“The entire case of prosecution for the offense of criminal conspiracy is based on conjectures and conjectures without any solid basis,” Special Judge Sunena Sharma said in her 271-page judgment last week. “The prosecution has miserably failed against all the accused in the absence of direct or indirect evidence to prove conspiracy under section 120B of the IPC,” the judge said.The case, one of 53 under the so-called “coal scam”, arose out of a 2012 reference by the Central Vigilance Commission into alleged irregularities in coal block allocation between 2006 and 2009.The CBI had alleged that SKS and its officials wrongly inflated the company’s investment, land possession, production capacity and environmental clearance to secure the allotment of Vijay Central Coal Block in Chhattisgarh. It also alleged that Sudhir Kumar Sahay misrepresented himself as a director and attempted to influence the process through recommendation letters, including one sent through his brother.However, given that the mining rights were held by Coal India Limited and not SKS, the court questioned how the private company could dishonestly obtain any ill-gotten gains and held that the allotment letter “cannot be construed as a grant of largesse” and was “more in the nature of coal linkage.”Rejecting the allegations of inflated financial muscle, the court said that the figures relied upon by SKS came from “audited balance sheets/annual reports” and were never alleged by the CBI to be fake.On the question of recommendation letters, Sahay’s lawyer, Neeraj Chaudhary, argued that “they were never considered by the coal or screening ministry”. The court agreed, saying there was “no evidence on record” to show the screening committee was influenced by the letters. It termed the prosecution’s interpretation of land and environmental clearance as “far-fetched” and “wholly unreasonable”.In 2014, the Supreme Court had quashed 214 coal block allocations made between 1993 and 2010, ordering a trial before a special CBI court.