Once again, CVC posts on website list of 145;tainted146; officers

This when the Supreme Court has issued and reiterated guidelines that such sanction from the parent ministries or departments should have reached the CBI within three months.

The list8212;updated until December 2004 and posted on the CVC website http://www.cvc.nic.in8212;contains the names of 70 officials, 55 of them are from Customs alone.

These include Assistant Commissioners, Appraising Officers, Superintendents, senior Income Tax officers, even two former Secretaries in a state government.

Chief Vigilance Commissioner P Shankar told The Sunday Express that while he would not go into the merits of the cases, the delay caused by absence of sanction was 8216;8216;inexcusable.8217;8217;

8216;8216;These names have been put on the website since we want people to know what actually holds up corruption cases. The sanction of prosecution should be an objective and not a subjective process. If departments are holding up sanction for years, there obviously is a problem in their functioning.8217;8217;

Incidentally, it was Shankar who had pulled out an earlier list posted by his predecessor N Vittal which featured names of officers facing FIRs on corruption charges.

CBI officials say that while they welcome the list being made public, they have already received the required sanction in two of the cases posted on the website. They added that in a majority of the cases on the list, the agency sent repeated reminders to the Ministries or Departments but to no avail.

The list shows that much of the blame lies with the Customs department which is holding up sanction in 12 cases involving 55 officials. Interestingly, all these cases were booked by the CBI in the year 2003.

In one case of 12 Customs officials allegedly cheating the Department to the tune of Rs 79 lakh, the CBI last month filed its chargesheet against eight private persons also implicated in the case.

The other cases on the CVC list involve officials in the Income Tax, Central Excise and the All India Institute of Medical Sciences this sanction is awaited since 2001.

There is also an old Bihar case in which two former IAS officers who were implicated in a case involving alleged favours to blacklisted transporters. This case dates back to 1993 and the request for sanction for prosecuting the two officers8212;who have since retired8212;has been pending for three years.