: The Madras High Court Bench has quashed charge memos against two former Junior Engineers of Madurai Corporation for providing drinking water connections to hotels flats and Industries in collusion with 10 other officials, allegedly for some favour.
The memos were issued by the Director of Municipal administration in 2009.
Justice S.Nagamuthu,who quashed the memos issued against S Sekar and R Baskaran, agreed with their contention that they would not be able to defend themselves properly in the departmental enquiry since the charges against them were vague and did not mention the date and time of the occurrence.
The judge pointed out that even in the annexure to the memo, issued later in August 2009,there was no specific charge except narrating facts in respect of various irregularities.
The concluding paragraph of the annexure lists out the names of the officials who had reportedly connived with one another to commit the alleged irregularities.
The officials named in the charge memo included the then Assistant Executive Engineer V. Mohandoss, Junior Engineer P. Subramanian, Junior Engineer M.V. Murugesa Pandian, Assistant Executive Engineer A. Madhuram, Assistant Commissioner R. Lakshmi, Assistant Commissioner Z. Magabooba, Assistant Commissioner P. Kubendran, Assistant Executive Engineer P.R. Ramkumar, Assistant Executive Engineer K.N. Damodharan and Junior Engineer R. Balaiah.
The judge said former executive engineer Madhuram was one of the earliest to challenge the memo. His petition was dismissed by a single judge.But when taken on appeal, a Division Bench reversed the dismissal and set it aside, since the charges had not been explained properly in the statement of allegations.
