A special court on Friday ordered framing of an additional charge of abetment of bribery against Congress leader and industrialist Naveen Jindal and others in a case pertaining to irregularities in the allocation of a Jharkhand coal block.

Naushad Akhter Ansari, chief executive officer of steel business at Jindal Steel & Power Ltd (JSPL) spoke to CNBC-TV18 on the case and about the company's outlook for FY19.

“The matter is subjudice, we don’t want to say much about it except saying that these charges are something which we are totally incorrect, according to us, and they are totally based on wrong understanding of this case. We believe that we have not done anything wrong, we have stated that again and again and we are the ones who has put up the power plant, we are suffering today because we don’t have coal and it doesn’t make any sense at all as far as we are concerned about these cases,” Ansari said.

“These cases have no implication as far as financial matter for the company is concerned,” he added.

Speaking about the business, he said, “Despite the power plants running at the sub-optimal capacity, we are still able to manage – on an independent basis - the JPL business. However, the fact is that we are not at all satisfied with the kind of cooperation, we are operating at about 50 percent kind of PLF and that is not good enough for the power business. We should have been doing much more but the coal is the single biggest worry, we don’t have sufficient coal, and we are starving for coal. So it is difficult to operate the plant.”

“The power prices have not gone up substantially and if you buy the coal at very high price, there is absolutely no profitability. So you need to have a viable solution,” said Ansari.

First Published:Jul 16, 2018 11:59 AM IST