Pandemonium reigned supreme on Thursday at an aborted special general meeting of one of Colombo’s once elitist social club’s The Capri, as the membership demanded the resignations of the remaining members of the crippled Management Committee.
Members asked that the three remaining members of what is left of the original fifteen (15) member Management Committee, viz President Morgan Fernando, Vice President Ananda Chittambalam and Treasurer N. Loganathan to step down and a new interim committee be appointed until later this month when a new set of office-bearers will be elected.
The members directed their fire mainly at Vice President Chittambalam who they say had assigned to himself the role of Secretary of the club without a mandate from the membership and was running the 57- year-old club “as if he owned it”. When a vote of no confidence was moved on him from the floor of the House, firecrackers were lit outside the meeting room.
A member present remarked that the fireworks must have been the work of the minor staff venting their frustrations at the management of the club. Mr. Fernando, however, apologised for the unprecedented scenes.
The special general meeting was called after months of dissension among a majority of members following an alleged VAT scam involving the club and the administration of the club in general. All but three members of the Management Committee elected last year have resigned and so have all the Trustees.
On the agenda for Thursday’s meeting was a resolution by a special committee appointed to amend the club rules to prevent persons who have a track record of criminal misappropriation and cheating from holding office. However, it was pointed out that with the Management Committee dysfunctional it was better to wait till a new Management Committee was in place.
An attempt by President Fernando requesting members to fill the vacancies on the Management Committee fell flat as there were no volunteers. Members present said they did not want to sit with Mr. Chittambalam on the Committee.
One of the member’s, a senior lawyer, brought up the issue of 40 new members being enrolled in violation of club procedures. He said their names should have been first put up on the notice board for objections, if any. When he asked for the club’s by-laws, the office-bearers were unable to produce them. “These club by-laws have gone for a walk”, he said.
Another lawyer-member said that those holding office at the club hold them in an honorary capacity and if the general membership has lost confidence in them, the honorable thing to do was to resign.
Another member walked up to the podium and recalled a previous occasion some years back when Mr. Chittambalam had asked the remaining members of the Management Committee to step down from office because they had lost the quorum. The member asked Mr. Chittambalam what the difference was now.
With Mr. Chittambalam refusing to answer the question, members began demanding “answer the question; answer the question”.
At this point, Mr. Fernando, Mr. Chittambalam and Mr. Loganathan walked out of the meeting summoned by them to the jeers of the members.
“The meeting was not terminated, not adjourned; it was suspended in mid-air”, one of the members present told the Sunday Times.
Asked by the Sunday Times yesterday as to what happened at Thursday’s stormy meeting where the members had demanded the ouster of the remaining members on the now defunct Management Committee, Mr. Fernando refused to comment.
The general membership thereafter appointed a six-member interim committee comprising former club presidents to manage the club till the annual general meeting scheduled for late September. They cited the ‘Doctrine of Necessity’ because the club has no Management Committee, no trustees and a secretary who was never elected to the post while it is under a VAT scam probe by the Inland Revenue Department. |
E-mail
