CGST Commissioner suspended over sexual harassment allegations by woman officer

Senior IRS officer and the commissioner of CGST Chennai Zone, S Ravi Selvan, was suspended by the Union Ministry of Finance on July 13. As per the suspension order, Ravi Selvan has been suspended with immediate effect, and during the suspension, his headquarters will be the CGST Kolkata Zone. According to sources, Ravi Selvan was suspended after an Internal Committee found him guilty of sexually harassing a woman IRS officer between December 2021 and April 2022. 

The Internal Committee that looked into her complaint as per the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, found Ravi Selvan guilty of the accusations made by woman officer. Following this, the Ministry of Finance suspended Ravi Selvan, and is contemplating further disciplinary action against him. 

Ravi Selvan has denied the allegations against him in a letter to the chairman of the Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs. The letter sent on June 18, 2022, accuses the complainant of filing a motivated complaint against him to evade proceedings of misconduct that he had initiated against her. While the complainant said that an incident of harassment happened in December 2021, Ravi in his letter said that he had been transferred out of the said office in July 2021, and did not work out of the same building as the complainant ever. 

Ravi Selvan has alleged that the harassment complaint was made to settle scores with him for sending a memo to the complainant in a tax evasion case. A source in CGST told TNM that the memo was sent only in 2022, and the woman had alleged that this was because Ravi Selvan had suspected that she would lodge a complaint of sexual harrasment. 

The alleged tax evasion is from 2019; the complainant has said the first instance of sexual harassment by Ravi Selvan was in December 2020; Ravi Selvan sent a memo to the complainant to start proceedings against her in the alleged Sabka Vishwas misuse incident in February 2022. The complainant filed her allegations to the IC on May 25, 2022.

Watch: This week on Let Me Explain, Anna Isaac looks at how governments are using multiple FIRs to keep journalists and critics in jail: