- Head of Marathi Daily Lokmat group, politically influential

- Two-term Congress Rajya Sabha MP Darda, five including his son sentenced

New Delhi: Former Rajya Sabha member Vijay Dardan, chairman of leading Marathi language news medium Lokmat, was today sentenced to four years in jail by a Delhi special court after he was convicted in the Coal scam. Along with Vijay Darda, his son Devendra Darda has also been jailed for the malfeasance to get a coal block in Chhattisgarh.

Earlier in the month, a court had found JLD Yamamal Energy Pvt Ltd director Manoj Kumar Jaiswal, former coal secretary HC Gupta, two other officials and Darda father-son guilty in a coal block acquisition case filed by the CBI earlier this month. All these convicts have been sentenced in this case today. Apart from this, a penalty of Rs.50 lakh has also been imposed on JLD Yamamal Company. In the CBI case which came out in 2012 during the tenure of the Dr. Manmohan Singh government after the complaint that there was widespread malpractice in the allocation of coal blocks, the agency has succeeded in 13 cases so far.

It may be mentioned here that the biggest allegation against Vijay Darda, the son of freedom fighter Jawaharlal Darda, was that when the CBI was investigating the coal scam, he met the then CBI chief Ranjit Sinha in person and made a submission to drop the case. In this regard, the Supreme Court also formed a special team and ordered to investigate Sinha's role to influence the investigation of the case.

Vijay Darda is a person of great political influence. After he won as an independent, the Congress gave him a ticket in 2010 and sent him to the Rajya Sabha. In March 2023, Darda was awarded an honorary D.Leet (Doctor of Literature) degree from DY Patil University in the presence of Chief Minister Eknath Shinde. Darda presented a donation check of Rs 71 lakh to Defense Minister Rajnath Singh to build a house for the soldiers guarding the Kargil Memorial.