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CHB chairman suspends XEN for clearing CEO house power bill
Chandigarh Housing Board (CHB) chairman Maninder Singh on Friday suspended executive engineer (electrical) SP Singh for sanctioning Rs 18,000 power bill for an unapproved camp office of board chief executive officer (CEO) SB Deepak Kumar.
Chandigarh Housing Board (CHB) chairman Maninder Singh on Friday suspended executive engineer (electrical) SP Singh for sanctioning Rs 18,000 power bill for an unapproved camp office of board chief executive officer (CEO) SB Deepak Kumar.
Read more: CEO gets power bill from housing board for unapproved ‘camp office’
The amount would be recovered from the salary of Singh. Another bill of Rs 32,000 that was approved and paid by the then executive engineer (electrical) Sunil Malik will be recovered from him (Malik).
In his reply to the show-cause notice issued in this regard on Tuesday, Singh said that he had indeed submitted a noting, clearly stating that the residence of the CEO had not been declared as camp office and therefore a decision was required whether the bill was to paid by the CEO or the CHB.
“If the CHB is to pay the bill, sanction may be accorded,” he claimed to have written in the noting.
“The noting was returned without any decision. Since the CEO pressured me to pay the bill, I gave approval and paid the amount,” the reply went on to add.
The show-cause notice issued to SP Singh on April 4 read, “How you have approved unauthorised expenditure at the residence of CEO in Sector 16, when it is not approved as the camp office. This ‘office’ at his residence is already under the scanner for expenditure of Rs 40 lakh and Board members are aware of it.”
HT on April 2, highlighted, how chief executive officer (CEO) of Chandigarh Housing Board (CHB), SB Deepak Kumar has got the nod for Rs 18,000 electricity bill of his unapproved ‘camp office’ to be paid by the board. It has also come to light that an earlier power bill of Rs 32,000 for four months for this ‘camp office’ was also paid by the board.
Officials said that the board can only pay the power bill of officers’ residence, and if it is a camp office and even then the meter had to be sanctioned in the Chandigarh Housing Board’s name with approval.
