15 yrs after retirement, ex-NIOT official gets 3-yr jail for loss to govt

CHENNAI: Fifteen years after his retirement from the National Institute of Ocean Technology (NOIT), a former manager of the institute’s Vessel management cell (VMC) was found guilty of corruption by a CBI court, which sentenced him to three years imprisonment and slapped a fine of Rs 50,000 on him after it was proved that he abused his position to sign off on bills to a Norwegian company.

G Janakiraman was serving as the group head of NOIT’s VMC from 2002 to 2007, incharge of maintenance and planning of voyages of NIOT ships for scientific experiments. VMC was also incharge of procurement of a new ship, ‘Sagar Nidhi’ for which the Norwegian company, M/s Vik-Sandvik was selected as a consultant in 2003.

The prosecution’s contention is that the Norwegian firm failed to prepare classification drawings and had not supervised the construction of the ship by the Italian firm, which resulted in low-quality construction causing loss to NIOT. It also contended that Janakiraman had certified the invoices of the consultant and passed them for payment without verifying.

CBI had registered an FIR in September 2011. During the trial, Janakiraman’s counsel submitted that the designs, documents and diagrams were sent by the consultant using interactive software. They added that the case was booked on the basis of lack of physical documents and he had not committed any misconduct.

However, it was proved in court that Janakiraman signed an employment contract with the Indian arm of Vik-Sandvik as its vice president, while he was serving in NIOT and he had cleared an invoice to the consultant during his tenure.