Upa Lokayukta Subhash B. Adi, armed with a clean chit from the High Court Committee that probed into allegations against him, resumed office on Monday, after a break of two and a half months.
Justice Adi had been away from office, while High Court judge R.B. Budihal was probing charges against him made by 78 Congress legislators.
He turned up at his office at around 11 a.m. in a private car and resumed office.
Refusing to comment on the allegations and the subsequent probe that exonerated him, he told The Hindu on Monday that he did not receive any new complaints, but was on a drive looking at all the pending files. “There are many pending files that have piled up in my absence. First, I will clear them and then take up new complaints,” he said.
While one of the allegations made against Mr. Adi was that he overstepped his jurisdiction and took up cases of Upa Lokayukta 1, it will now be interesting to see how the two Upa Lokayuktas – Subhash B. Adi and N. Ananda – will now divide work among themselves.
An office memo issued by former Lokayukta Shivaraj Patil had divided various districts between the two Upa Lokayuktas as their jurisdictions. However, Justice Adi had contended that he was bound only by the Karnataka Lokayukta Act, 1984, which did not stipulate any jurisdictions between the two Upa Lokayuktas.
When quizzed over the issue, Justice Adi said that he was looking into only those files that were placed before him, while refusing to comment over the jurisdiction issue.
