Hyderabad: Pointing out that the delay in disposal of ACB cases was sending wrong signals leading to rampant corruption in administration, the Forum for Good Governance (FGG) on Wednesday requested the Chief Minister A Revanth Reddy to streamline the procedure to finalize ACB cases in two to three years.

The FGG president M Padmanabha Reddy said that the anti-Corruption Bureau was regularly registering cases related to trap or disproportionate assets. Common man is surprised to see that where ACB raided the houses of employee’s properties worth hundreds of crores of rupees were detected. The employees have no fear of punishment for ACB cases. The prevailing atmosphere was that the cases will be dropped at a later date or delayed very badly, leading to dilution of the case.

Reddy said that the Forum for Good Governance feels that the bottle neck for quick disposal of cases was delay in respective departments in Secretariat. In trap or disproportionate assets cases the accused officer should be prosecuted within six months of registering the case. At present, abnormal delay was taking place to accord prosecution permission. Manipulations take place in Secretariat and instead of prosecution, the cases were referred to Departmental inquiry or to Commissioner of Inquiries or to Tribunal for disciplinary proceedings which pave the way for closure of the case.

Citing examples of few cases, the FGG president said that in 2010, a big liquor scam was unearthed involving a large number of officers of various departments like Excise, Revenue, Police etc. Government constituted a Special Investigation Team (SIT) headed by DG ACB. The SIT conducted an in depth inquiry and registered 67 cases on officers of Excise, Police and Revenue departments and submitted its report in 2011 to the Government with a request to give permission to prosecute the accused officers. Lot of manipulations took place and the issue was badly delayed by the government and finally prosecution permission was given in 22 cases. As many as 15 cases were referred to the Commissioner of Inquiries, 20 cases were referred to the Tribunal for disciplinary proceedings and 10 cases were referred to departmental inquiry. Out of 67 cases registered in 2011 and 2012, two cases were finalized and further action dropped. The balance 65 cases were pending in courts, with departments since last 13 years. This is not an isolated case, no ACB case is finalized in 10 years, the FGG president said.