Senior IAS officer Vinod Kumar sentenced to three years imprisonment

Bhubaneswar : The Special Vigilance Court here on Monday awarded three years of jail term to senior IAS officer Vinod Kumar in connection with the Rs 1.02-crore scam in Odisha Rural Housing Development Corporation (ORHDC).

The IAS officer, and six others, have been charged with misappropriating funds in the ORHDC on the pretext of providing flats to the customers.

Earlier, Kumar was convicted for his financial irregularities to the tune of Rs 55 lakh. The former managing director of ORHDC was arrested on August 10 soon after he surrendered in court. The court had also ordered a three-year imprisonment for Kumar and former ORHDC Executive Director (Technical) Purna Chandra Das.

Vigilance Directorate had registered a case against Kumar and five other employees of the Corporation— Sanjay Mohanty, Purna Chandra Das, Pradip Kumar Rout, Chitta Ranjan Mohanty, and Ashish Kumar Nayak— in 2000 for their alleged involvement in financial irregularities to the tune of Rs 55 lakh in the construction of cyclone shelters after the Super Cyclone in October 1999.