The Madras High Court has come across a peculiar case of the Directorate of Enforcement (ED) having attached a wrong property belonging to people unconnected with a crime being investigated by the agency. The mistake had occurred because of the accused having mentioned the name of the village wrongly in the property document.
Justices P.N. Prakash (since retired) and N. Anand Venkatesh have directed the Sulur Sub-Registrar in Coimbatore district to carry out necessary corrections in the property document within a month and the ED to lift the attachment of the wrong property within a month thereafter so that the owners could deal with it as they wish to do.
The judges pointed out that Thavasi Gounder (since dead) owned about 7.33 acres in survey number 25/3 of Karavazhi Madhappur village. After his death, his children wanted to partition the property. When they went to the Sulur Sub-Registrar’s office, they were shocked to find that it had been attached by the ED.
Inquiries made by them revealed that the ED actually wanted to attach a property in survey number 25/3 of Kaniyur village, which belonged to VMT Textile Mills Limited, represented by K. Duraisamy, but ended up attaching their property because the name of the village had been mentioned wrongly in the textile mills’ property document.
Therefore, Thavasi Gounder’s son Rayappan alias Rayappa Gounder filed a writ petition, through counsel D. Veerasekharan, urging the court to quash the attachment order. He also sought a direction to the ED to issue a no objection certificate so that the petitioner and his family members could partition their property.
In order to confirm the assertion, the judges directed the Sulur Sub-Registrar to inspect both properties as well as the records and submit a report to the court. Accordingly, the officer filed a report confirming that a mistake had crept in mentioning the name of the village in the property document and that it could be corrected.
“We cannot blame the ED for this mistake since they purely went by the description of the property in Document Number 3674 of 1992. Probably, if the ED officials had physically verified the property that was provisionally attached, they could have identified the mistake,” the judges said and ordered rectification of the mistake.