Anbil Mahesh moves Madras High Court to quash FIR in ₹100-crore school approval fraud case

The ₹100-crore question in Tamil Nadu's school-education scandal now has a constitutional wrapper. Former School Education Minister Anbil Mahesh Poyyamozhi has moved the Madras High Court seeking to quash the FIR registered against him in the alleged private-school approval scam, arguing that the investigation itself is legally stillborn. His core claim: under Section 17A of the Prevention of Corruption Act, only the Governor — the authority competent to remove a minister — could have granted sanction to investigate him, not the Public Department Secretary who signed off through a government letter on June 23, 2026. That sanction, his petition says, is "non est in law" and cannot sustain the FIR or anything built on it. The case against him is sprawling. The Chennai Central Crime Branch alleges that money running into crores was collected from 177 private schools on promises of securing government approvals — permanent recognition, upgradation, DTCP clearances. On September 16, police searched premises linked to the former minister in Chennai and Tiruchirappalli, seizing 118 documents, 18 mobile phones, three laptops, eight pen drives, two desktop computers, a tablet and an iPad. Two days later, Poyyamozhi sat through nearly eight hours of questioning — 295 questions prepared, 246 answered, by his own account. His petition, argued by Senior Advocate P. Wilson, goes beyond procedure into politics. The FIR, it says, discloses no specific act of dishonest conduct attributable to him personally, is vague, and arrives after an inordinate, unexplained delay of over four years from the original complaint. "The haste in registering the FIR post regime change in the State of Tamil Nadu," the petition reads, shows the former minister is being subjected to "biased investigation as a part of regime revenge." He also flags that the CCB added Prevention of Corruption Act provisions through an FIR alteration report on September 9, yet retained the investigation instead of handing it to the Directorate of Vigilance and Anti-Corruption — the body he says is the sole authorised investigator of PCA cases in the state — and that the alteration report names no illegal gratification paid to him. Justice V. Lakshminarayanan has directed the state to file its counter and adjourned the matter. A similar Section 17A question is already before the court in E.V. Velu's case. Meanwhile, the Enforcement Directorate is running a parallel money-trail probe, and one accused has already walked out on default bail after the agency missed its 90-day deadline for a final report. Whatever the court decides on sanction, the underlying question will not go away: who collected crores from 177 schools, in whose name, and where did the money go?