President sacks 34 AIADMK lawyers

CHENNAI, JAN 29: The services of 34 Additional Central Government Standing Counsels, the majority of whom are either AIADMK sympathisers o...

CHENNAI, JAN 29: The services of 34 Additional Central Government Standing Counsels, the majority of whom are either AIADMK sympathisers or partymen, have been terminated by the President of India.

An order from the Union Ministry of Law, Justice and Company Affairs, which communicated the termination of the lawyers with immediate effect, advised the Deputy Legal Adviser, Department of Legal Affairs at Chennai to take over all the pending briefs from the ousted advocates and to distribute them equally among the panel of advocates in the Madras High Court. The 34 ousted advocates include AIADMK Mylapore Assembly constituency contestant for the 1996 general elections T K Sampath, S M Loganathan, K M Kannappa Rajendran, T V Ganesh, N S Kalaiselvi, P Thamizh Mani and S Gomathi Nayagam.

Though the President of India had appointed three new senior central government standing counsel and 25 additional central government standing counsel in July last year, most of the AIADMK advocates continued to hold the post.Now the official order has come.

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The 34 advocates were appointed amid controversy. The appointment orders were reportedly distributed to them at the Poes Garden residence of former chief minister J Jayalalitha in April 1998, when the AIADMK was part of the BJP government.

There are 67 posts of Central government standing counsel at various levels in the State.

Though lawyers belonging to the AIADMK were appointed to the posts, no case relating to party leaders were assigned to them. The old set of advocates, who held the posts earlier, retained with them the relevant files relating to such cases, as they had been advised by the Centre not to hand over the same to the AIADMK advocates.

There were also charges of corruption against some lawyers and they had been isolated without assignment of any work following instructions to this effect by the then BJP Government.

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