SC slams Excise department's delay

The Supreme Court last week criticised the Commissioner of Central Excise, Madurai, for unnecessary litigation up to the apex level on a small amount of duty. It said in the judgment, CCE vs Ayyappan Textiles Ltd: "This is a typical case where at every stage of the litigation irrelevant legal principles were pressed into service resulting in colossal waste of time of adjudicators including time of the Supreme Court." The amount involved was Rs 1.34 lakh and the dispute was over the quality of a batch of cotton yarn but the litigation travelled between different adjudicating authorities since 1993. The Supreme Court also criticised the Excise Appellate Tribunal for going into "questions of law unwarranted by the facts of the case." In view of the "paltry amount involved, the long and chequered history of the litigation and the resultant wastage of time of various forums," the court dismissed the appeal.

MTNL appeal on land dismissed
Curtains fell on a three-decade-old land acquisition for a telegraph office in Mumbai when the Supreme Court dismissed the appeal case, Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd vs State of Maharashtra, last week. The court remarked that "after 37 years of initiation of the acquisition proceedings in (1973) and 28 years of the pronouncement of the award by the land acquisition officer, the Nigam filed the writ petition," the court observed. Moreover, MTNL did not come to the court with clean hands, as there was suppression of facts.