COIMBATORE: A special meeting of university syndicate, held on Thursday, constituted a Convenor Committee to take over the functions of the suspended Vice Chancellor, A Ganapathi.
The committee, headed by Higher Education Secretary Sunil Paliwal, has as its members Dr N Jeyakumar, HOD of Bioinformatics department and Dr P Thirunavukkarasu, Associate Professor in Electronics, SRMV College of Arts and Science.
On Thursday morning, DVAC sleuths filed a custody petition before the Special court judge John Mino seeking Ganapathi’s custody. “An interrogation with the Ganapathi is still required to complete the investigation,” said the custody petition.
On hearing the petition, defense counsel raised objections to police custody. Since it was a trap case, all the inquiries relevant to the trap case may have been completed on the same day and henceforth, his detention and his custody for further interrogation was not necessary, argued Defense Counsel Gnanabharathi.
On charges mentioned in the First Information Report that four cheques were given to the VC Ganapathi along with Rs 1 lakh in cash, Gnanabharathi countered that the police did not recover even a single cheque. “So, there are chances that DVAC would be involved in malpractice and would bring some different cheque, showing them as the ones recovered from the VC,” he said. The hearing was adjourned to Friday.
Meanwhile, the bail petition filed by the defence counsel also came up on Thursday. “Only demanding and accepting is portrayed as a bribe. Ganapathi has never demanded it,”Gnanabharathi said.
Public prosecutor Sivakumar claimed that the arrested professor Dharmaraj established the deal between Dharmaraj and Ganapathi. Documents regarding this were also produced. Judge John Mino dismissed the bail petition.
Mathivanan removed from in-charge post
Following a case against the distance education Director(In-Charge) R Mathivanan on charges of aiding the Vice-chancellor in getting the bribe, he was removed from the Director (In-Charge) of School of Distance Education and Statistics department professor KK Suresh took charge as the Director (In-Charge) of the School of Distance Education.