The outgoing president of the Coordination Committee of Registered MeECL (Employee) Associations and Unions (CCORMAU) as well as the MeECL Engineers’ Association, Pradeep Kumar Chullet, today strenuously denied charges of corruption made against him.
Chullet announced that, “for the dignity of CCORMAU” he has stepped down from the post of president.
CCORMAU and the top brass of the state-owned utility have been trading accusations against each other for weeks now.
One of the claims made against Chullet is that he awarded multi-crore contracts to a firm (IS Enterprise) owned by his wife, one Ayanla Imsu. He stated that the true proprietor of the company is one Indira Slong and that he does not know her.
“I don’t know who this Ayanla Imsu is. That is not the name of my children’s mother. In fact, she never worked in the Inspectorate of Electricity,” Chullet, who was a senior electrical inspector from 2011 to 2018, said.
The allegation fails on another front in that there is no bar for a spouse to participate in a tender, Chullet said, adding that he had this confirmed by a lawyer.
“Therefore there is no conflict of interest if general procedures of tendering are followed,” he stated.
Another part of the accusation, however, was that Chullet avoided tendering at all by splitting the contracts into chunks smaller than Rs 50,000. Projects under this figure do not require tenders to be floated.
Chullet responded by saying that splitting of work is a normal process, particularly for work executed in different districts. He said that this practice is prevalent in other departments, not just the MeECL.
He also denied that projects worth crores of rupees were allotted to IS Enterprise, saying that the figure was in the area of several lakhs.
Chullet also denied that he was guilty of nepotism, stating that the corporation has a well-laid out procedure for hiring staff and making appointments to the lower grades. He also denied that Nidamon Chullet, who it was claimed he had awarded work to, was his brother.
“We belong from the same clan but hail from different villages. Work was allotted to him on the strength of his documents,” Chullet added.
