Madras high court directs bar council to initiate proceedings against 7 advocates
Chennai: Slamming the legal practitioners in the Motor Accident Claims jurisdiction, the Madras high court has directed the Bar Council of Tamil Nadu and Puducherry to initiate disciplinary proceedings against 7 advocates who are involved in double/duplicate (fake) insurance claim cases.
Justice P.N.Prakash who gave the directive said the entire exercise relating to the disciplinary proceedings against advocates V.Velu, M.Jeevanantham, N.Azhakiyakumaran, Ramaa Radhakrishnan, N.Shankar, S.Natarajan and M.Sivamani shall be completed expeditiously and compliance report filed before this court.
Originally, on a petition filed by Cholamandalam MS General Insurance Co. Ltd, alleging 3 separate claims for the death of the same person, the judge had appointed Justice K. Chandru, a retired judge of the Madras high court, as an expert body to enquire into the fake insurance claims and file reports. Accordingly, the retired judge had filed four interim reports. Based on the reports, Justice Prakash had issued show cause notice to 7 advocates who were involved in the fake insurance claims. After going through the affidavits filed by them and hearing them, the judge has passed the present order.
The judge said, "This court is pained and anguished while reading all these affidavits and the findings in the interim report. This court is a tad cynical that no mater what steps it takes, the practitioners appear to be one step ahead. That is born of nothing but lure of the lucre they say. You do not need to burn the midnight oil and learn hard to become financially successful. It may have taken a K.Parasaran or Fali S. Nariman, years of hard work, toil and genuine practice, to reach their level of financial strength meritoriously. Here, in this jurisdiction, all you require it seems, is knowledge of networking and contact, a corpus to invest and muscle power to exercise control over your territory and you are off on a financial joy ride to make easy money. Huge returns for the investments made, that no stock market or even satta market can seem to yield. We need not grudge the financial success or muscle of these practitioners. But, if the adopted means are questionable as they seem to be, then we have duty to rein them in, to retain the purity in the administration of justice, which is the heart and soul of the judicial firmament. This court is, therefore, duty bound to take note lest these practices continued and the decay gets irreparable.
