Dismissal cannot be set aside for non-production of enquiry records if industrial dispute is raised after inordinate delay.

The Respondent, a clerk at the Petitioner-Bank, was dismissed on October 18, 2000, following a domestic inquiry into allegations of misappropriating customer funds

Although the Respondent was later acquitted in a related criminal trial in 2013, he waited 13 years after his dismissal to raise an industrial dispute

By the time the matter reached the Industrial Tribunal, the Bank had destroyed the inquiry records as per its standard document retention policy

The Tribunal held that while the inquiry was fair, the findings were perverse because the Bank could not produce the original witness depositions to support the Enquiry Officer’s conclusions

The Tribunal subsequently set aside the dismissal and awarded full backwages and continuity of service

The court applied the equitable principles of laches and acquiescence as detailed in SBI v. M.J. James, which establish that while limitation may not strictly apply to industrial disputes, gross delay can obscure facts and cause incurable prejudice to the opposing party

It further cited Damoh Panna Sagar Rural Reg. Bank & Anr v. Munna Lal Jain to emphasize the high standard of integrity required of bank employees

The court also reaffirmed the settled principle that domestic inquiries operate on the "preponderance of probabilities," whereas criminal trials require "proof beyond reasonable doubt," making them distinct legal processes

The Court reasoned that the Respondent’s 13-year delay in challenging his dismissal constituted "inactive acquiescence" that significantly prejudiced the Bank

Since the Respondent had participated in the original inquiry and received all documents at that time, the burden of producing those records shifted to him if he chose to litigate after the Bank’s records were naturally destroyed over time

The Court found that the Tribunal erred by "rewarding the Respondent for his own wrong"

Furthermore, the Court noted that the Enquiry Officer’s report provided an elaborate 24-page discussion of the evidence, which the Tribunal ignored in favor of a technicality regarding the missing raw depositions

Finally, the Court held that the Respondent’s criminal acquittal was irrelevant because the standards of proof and the objectives of the two proceedings are fundamentally different

It held that the findings of the Enquiry Officer were NOT perverse and that the dismissal was legal and justified given the serious nature of the misconduct

The Court concluded that a litigant cannot use self-created delays to prevent a fair adjudication or to penalize an employer for the non-preservation of decades-old documents