Senior official booked for taking bribe to handle ‘DVAC probes’

A joint director of the Social Welfare department has been booked by the Directorate of Vigilance and Anti-Corruption sleuths on the charges of demanding and accepting huge bribes from subordinates in the guise of helping them in Vigilance inquiries.

Accused officer S Revathy, Joint Director of Nutritious Meal Programme in the Commissionerate of Social Welfare, fabricated false petitions of corruption and irregularities against said district-level programme officers of Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) during 2020 and made them pay huge sums to different bank accounts. She contacted these officers over the phone or WhatsApp offering her support in closing these petitions by way of a favourable departmental inquiry, said DVAC sleuths.

Revathy, according to DVAC, had engaged one R Govindarajan to collect the major portion of the bribe amount on her behalf and had also engaged other private persons to receive the bribe money in their accounts. They were identified as S Rajkumar, Kalicharan, Andrew Larson, Babu and B Vinayakamoorthy.

DVAC sleuths said Govindarajan is the second main accused as the other accused transferred the bribe money deposited in their accounts to that of Govindarajan and he withdrew the sums to hand it over to Revathy by cash.

During the offence period, Revathy had received money from programme officers (ICDS) of Salem, Tirunelveli, Pudukkottai, Nagapattinam and Theni districts.