The Madras High Court on Wednesday adjourned to June 21 the hearing on two cases filed against Municipal Administration Minister S.P. Velumani accusing him and some officials of indulging in massive irregularities in award of several contracts for civil works by the Greater Chennai and Coimbatore Municipal Corporations in the last few years.
Jayaram Venkatesan of Arappor Iyakkam, a non-governmental organisation, and Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam organising secretary R.S. Bharathi had filed the cases in 2018. When they were listed before Chief Justice Sanjib Banerjee and Justice Senthilkumar Ramamoorthy, advocate V. Suresh, representing Mr. Venkatesan, urged the court to fix a date for hearing.
However, senior counsel Mukul Rohatgi, took strong exception to such a plea and accused the petitioners of indulging in “mischief” despite the Directorate of Vigilance and Anti-Corruption (DVAC) having given a clean chit to the Minister in its preliminary inquiry and the government too having decided to drop all further proceedings after accepting the inquiry report.
“The mischief is that they [petitioners] want to keep the pot boiling when elections are round the corner. Nothing survives in these petitions when the government itself had accepted DVAC’s preliminary inquiry report and dropped all further proceedings. The petitioners must seek further remedy in accordance with law,” the senior counsel told the first Division Bench.
On their part, Advocate General Vijay Narayan and State Public Prosecutor A. Natarajan also brought it to the notice of the court that the State too had specifically taken out an application urging the court to close the two cases since a detailed preliminary inquiry had already been conducted on the complaints lodged by the petitioners and they were found to be frivolous.
Rebutting their contentions, Mr. Suresh claimed that the preliminary inquiry by the DVAC was orchestrated to get the present cases closed and hence such an inquiry could not be taken at its face value. He said the government was even resisting his client’s plea to furnish a copy of the inquiry report to him so that he could point out its fallacies.
After recording their submissions, the first Bench said the two cases had been dealt with by other Division Benches of the High Court in the last two years and hence it may not be appropriate for it to take them up for final hearing when elections were round the corner. Deciding to hear the cases after the summer vacation for the court in May, the judges ordered their listing on June 21. They also made it clear that mere pendency of the two cases should not be regarded as any adverse inference having been drawn against the Minister just as the petitioner’s counsel had contended that mere obtaining of the preliminary inquiry report would not absolve the Minister of all charges.
