Madras High Court. File
| Photo Credit: K. Pichumani
Why is that the wheels of prosecution grind very slowly when it comes to Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officers accused of corruption, wondered Justice N. Anand Venkatesh of the Madras High Court on Monday (November 10, 2025) while dealing with a ₹98.25-crore corporation contract corruption case involving former AIADMK Minister S.P. Velumani and a few others.
Bewildered over the Directorate of Vigilance and Anti-Corruption (DVAC) not having obtained sanction to prosecute IAS officers K.S. Kandasamy and K. Vijaya Karthikeyan to date, despite completing the investigation in the corruption case in January 2024 itself, the judge insisted that the prosecuting agency must necessarily explain the delay to the court.
He agreed with advocate V. Suresh, representing anti-corruption organisation Arappor Iyakkam which had lodged the complaint against Mr. Velumani and others in 2021, that the Tamil Nadu government need not have spent nearly ₹30 lakh to translate around 12,000 pages of documents now if the DVAC had obtained the sanction against the two IAS officers before October 2024.
The judge pointed out that the need to submit translated copies was made mandatory by the Centre only from October 2024. Hence, the DVAC was duty bound to list out the reasons for not having obtained the sanction against the two IAS officers between January and October 2024, especially when the sanction to prosecute Mr. Velumani was obtained from the Legislative Assembly Speaker on February 12, 2024, he said.
Lamenting that more often than not, the investigating agencies had to be prodded by the courts to take every other action in corruption cases right from the stage of registration of First Information Report, the judge said, in the present case, the DVAC had submitted a request to the Centre to grant sanction to prosecute the two IAS officers only after Arappor Iyakkam’s Jayaram Venkatesan filed the present contempt of court plea.
The request was submitted on August 30, 2025, but got returned for want of translated copies of the vernacular documents submitted in support of the request. Thereafter, on the basis of a series of interim orders passed in the contempt plea, the DVAC had translated the voluminous documents by spending huge amount of public money and re-submitted the request to the Centre on November 7, 2025.
When the judge wanted to know what the outer limit for grant of sanction by the Centre was, Addiitonal Public Prosecutor E. Raj Thilak said, it was three months. The APP also agreed to obtain instructions from the all investigating officers who had handled the case since January 2024 and find out the reasons for the delay in obtaining sanction against the two IAS officers.
“The State shows speed in doing every thing else. The same speed should be shown when it comes to taking action against corruption too. Otherwise, people will lose faith. In fact, action against corruption should get the first priority. Everything else can wait. Contrarily, what we see is that the action against corruption gets the last priority,” Justice Venkatesh rued before adjourning the contempt plea.
Published – November 10, 2025 05:40 pm IST
