Plea to register FIR against SP Velumani

Chennai: An NGO has approached the Madras high court to direct the DVAC to register an FIR against SP Velumani, minister for municipal administration, rural development and implementation of special programmes, for the alleged irregularities to the tune of several crores in awarding tenders for government projects.

 A division bench comprising Justices M. Sathyanarayanan and P.Rajamanickam before whom the PIL filed by Arappor Iyakkam represented by its managing trustee Jayaram Venkatesan came up for hearing, suo motu impleaded municipal administration and water supply department, commissioners of Chennai and Coimbatore corporations.

The bench also ordered notice, returnable by January 23 to DVAC, state government, minister Velumani and 4 others.

Petitioner's counsel V. Suresh submitted that the petitioner seeks prosecution of minister Velumani for brazen abuse of power, favoritism and gross breach of trust in performance of his public/official duty by way of encouraging open flouting of laws relating to awarding of tenders for government projects, promoting cartelization of bidding so as to favour his close aides and benamis and other acts which constitute offences under the Prevention of corruption Act and other laws. 

The petitioner was forced to file this petition as his written complaint to appropriate prosecution authorities has not yielded any results and to the contrary, he was met with resounding silence, Suresh added.

Suresh said an analysis of a number of tenders issued by Coimbatore and Chennai corporations for the government project works revealed that most of the tenders issued had only 2 bidders. While, there were scores of registered contractors who had been awarded tenders in the same corporations earlier, the pattern noticed of only 2 bidders participating in most bids raises a strong suspicion that these tenders were prefixed and pre-decided. 

Two of the firms from amongst KCP Engineers Pvt.Ltd, Vardhan Infrastructure, Constronics India, P.Senthil and CO and Robert Raja alone participated with one of them winning the tender. Rajan Chandrasekhar who was one of the directors of KCP until 2016 has been a member of AIADMK and holds the post of Rural district MGR youth wing secretary, Coimbatore. 

He also became the printer and publisher for AIADMK's official newspaper 'Namadhu Amma' recently. He was a very close aide of minister Velumani.

Therefore, pointing out all the irregularities, the petitioner sent a detailed complaint to the DVAC and CBI. But, the petitioner has not received any reply from them, Suresh added.