Tamil Nadu - Madurai   

Videoconferencing employed to arbitrate case

MADURAI: For the first time in the State, the Madurai Chapter of the Tamil Nadu Mediation and Conciliation Centre on Thursday utilised videoconferencing to arbitrate a case with foreign nationals.

A team of mediators of the Madurai Bench of the Madras High Court held talks with a lawyer at the Republic of Benin in Western Africa in a case involving $47.5 million. After preliminary discussions, the mediators told the lawyer that a team would visit Benin shortly to arrive at a solution.

The case pertains to an anticipatory bail petition filed by Rev. D. Dhinakaran, founder president, Asian Evangelical Church and Union Society, in a case of cheating registered against him by the Crime Branch-CID here. Justice G. Rajasuria had referred the matter to the mediation centre because the petitioner pleaded innocence and promising to pay back the depositors who had invested in the society.

According to the complainants, the petitioner belonging to Karnataka opened an office at Tiruvanmiyur in Chennai and appointed trustees for his society across Tamil Nadu. In Madurai alone, 11 trustees collected more than Rs.7 crore from several building contractors, assuring them of contracts for building houses for the poor.

As the project did not take off, one of them filed a complaint. Rev. Dhinakaran claimed that he mooted the project in 2004 on the basis of an assurance given by Ikye Auton, a businessman in Benin, to donate $47.5 million. He met with an accident in 2005 when the money was ready to be brought into India. So, he sent another trustee to bring the money, in cash, through the European countries.

Officials of the European Union Economic Commission seized the money at the Orly airport in France, in July 2005.

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