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1992 (7) TMI 353

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..... ned therein. The petitioner has filed this application under Section 482, Cr. P.C. for quashing the proceeding started in the Court below on the basis of the said complaint. The complaint was filed against the Company, M/s. Paharimata Iron Works (Pvt.) Ltd. and its two Directors of which the present petitioner is one. A departmental proceeding was also started and in that proceeding the adjudicating officer found the petitioner and others guilty and imposed a fine of Rupees 10,000/- upon the present petitioner by his order dated 23-12-82. Against that order of the adjudicating officer an appeal was preferred by the present petitioner before the Appellate Board under the provisions of the FERA and the said Appellate Board by order dated 23-5 .....

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..... also a Director becomes liable for the offence committed by the Company if it is proved that the alleged contravention of any provision of the Act or of any Rule, direction or order made thereunder has taken place with the consent or connivance of or is attributable to any neglect on the part of the Director. Therefore the mere fact that a person was a Director of the Company does not make him liable for the offence committed by the Company unless such Director factually comes within the mischief of Section 68. The adjudicating officer found the present petitioner guilty simply on the ground that he was a Director which is not tenable and therefore the Appellate Board rightly interfered with the order of the adjudicating officer pro tanto. .....

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..... a firm and the firm was a genuine one. In view of such positive finding of fact the Supreme Court held the prosecution untenable. In our present case there is no positive finding of the Appellate Board in respect of the relevant matter. Here the Appellate Board set aside the order of the adjudicating officer relating to the petitioner only on the ground that there was no finding that the petitioner could be made liable under Section 68 of the FERA. The learned Advocate for the petitioner also attracted my attention to an unreported decision of a Division Bench of this Court passed on 17-9-91 in Criminal Revision No. 593 of 1991 Janardhan Thakur, Jeena and Co. v. Uday Biswas. That was a case under the Customs Act, 1962. There also, there was .....

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..... d set aside the order of the adjudicating officer not because of any positive finding but because of absence of a positive finding. When the departmental proceeding against the petitioner and the order passed against him in that proceeding became fruitless simply because of absence of a positive finding and not because of any positive finding the criminal prosecution, in my opinion, should not be quashed for that reason. The decisions relied upon by the learned Advocate for the petitioner were all based on positive finding of facts and are therefore distinguishable from the facts of our present case. Consequently those decisions are not applicable here. In the present case the petition of complainant contains a specific averment in paragrap .....

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