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2015 (1) TMI 1176 - MADRAS HIGH COURTDenial of Permission for re-export of goods - Violation of principle of natural justice - Reason for decision not recorded - Held that:- Face of an order passed by a quasi-judicial authority or even an administrative authority affecting the rights of parties, must speak and it must not be like the inscrutable face of a sphinx . Recording of reasons operates as a valid restraint on any possible arbitrary exercise of judicial and quasi-judicial or even administrative power and it re-assures that discretion has been exercised by the decision maker on relevant grounds and by disregarding extraneous considerations. The authority shall adduce reasons which will be regarded as fair and legitimate by a reasonable man and will discard irrelevant or extraneous considerations. Therefore, the statutory authority, which is a decision maker, by exercising statutory power given under the Act, must assign the reasons while making the decisions and communicate the same to the aggrieved party. As already noted, the impugned communication was served on the petitioner with one sentence mentioning denial of re-exporting the consignment and admittedly, no reasons have been assigned in the impugned proceedings, dated 24.7.2012. It is clear that the re-export of the material can be made based on the declaration of the Director of testing Lab that the said drugs are not of substandard. In the present case, the Deputy Drugs Controller was of the view that the material itself is ‘spurious drugs’ since it has been imported by the petitioner without adequate registration and import licence and the documents furnished by the petitioner are forged and fake. For the risk of repetition, this Court reiterates that this Court cannot venture upon the issues, viz., whether the petitioner has imported the consignment based on the forged and fake documents from unregistered source contrary to the provisions of the Act and whether the detained material is a ‘spurious’, etc., since these are the allegations levelled against the petitioner, are the disputed questions of fact and are subject matter of the prosecution already launched against the petitioner. Therefore, it is not appropriate for the Deputy Drugs Controller to pre-determine that the drugs are ‘spurious’ now itself in order to reject the claim of the petitioner for re-exporting of the consignment. As regards the contention raised on behalf of the respondents that the material in dispute is the subject matter of the prosecution and it is required for marking during the trial as part of the evidence, is concerned, as rightly pointed out by the learned senior counsel that there is no need to detain the entire material for the purpose of marking as material object during the trial of the prosecution and it may be sufficient that a sample thereof may be retained for that purpose and the consignment can be permitted to re-export since the retention of the same is causing great prejudice to the petitioner since the funds of the petitioner to the extent of the invoice value of the goods has been blocked under the letter of credit. - Decided in favour of assessee.
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