Lucknow, July 31 (IANS) A special CBI court in Lucknow has convicted and sentenced Durgesh Bahadur Singh, then posted as Goods Clerk at Dariyapur Junction Railway Station in Uttar Pradesh's Raebareli district, to four years' imprisonment in a bribery case, an official statement said on Friday. The sentence was pronounced on July 30. Besides the jail term, the court also imposed a fine of Rs 10,000 on the accused.According to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), the case was registered on October 13, 2017, following a complaint by the Director of M/s R.D. Cement Industries Pvt. Ltd., Lucknow.The complainant alleged that Singh had demanded a bribe of Rs 60,000 in return for substantially reducing a demurrage charge of Rs 1.26 lakh levied on the company. The charge had been imposed after the firm failed to unload raw materials from a railway rake within the stipulated time.

During negotiations, the accused allegedly agreed to accept the revised demurrage amount of Rs 37,800 and an illegal gratification of Rs 7,200 from the complainant.Acting on the complaint, the CBI laid a trap and caught Singh red-handed while accepting the bribe amount of Rs 7,200.Following the investigation, the agency filed a charge sheet against the accused public servant on November 30, 2017.After examining the evidence and concluding the trial, the CBI court found the accused guilty and sentenced him accordingly, the agency said.It said it actively pursues corruption charges and takes them to logical conclusions. Recently, the CBI arrested an Assistant Engineer (AE) of Delhi’s Public Works Department (PWD) along with a representative of a private construction firm and one of the firm's employees, in connection with a bribery racket involving the execution of a government construction project.Just a week ago, the CBI arrested a Senior Divisional Materials Manager (Sr DMM) of the North Eastern Railway (NER) in Varanasi for allegedly accepting a bribe of Rs 1.70 lakh.

/IANS