An Indian court on Saturday jailed a former telecoms minister for three years over a 1993 financial scandal when he was in office, court officials said. The 86-year-old Sukh Ram was India's telecommunications minister for three years from 1993 when the corruption scandal involving him and two bureaucrats surfaced.
Ram was sent to the same prison in New Delhi where another disgraced former telecoms minister, A. Raja, has been held since February last year while he awaits trial over a separate corruption case. Last month, Delhi High Court upheld a lower court's 2002 ruling that Ram and the two officials defrauded the state exchequer by awarding a contract to supply telecom equipment to a private firm at a higher rate than stipulated.
Ram is also linked to a separate financial scandal in which a court in 2009 sentenced him to three years in jail but he had been bailed. Raja has been accused of selling second-generation (2G) telecom licences in 2008 at throwaway prices in return for kickbacks. National auditors estimate that the losses from the cut-price sales could have cost the national treasury up to $40 billion.
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