Former CM sues firm for Rs2m over ‘faulty’ generator

Respondent says generator was overloaded, won’t pay damages.

LAHORE:

A suit has been filed on behalf of former chief minister Dost Muhammad Khosa against the Sunshine Engineering Company for allegedly selling him a faulty generator. The petitioner is seeking Rs2 million in damages.

A consumer court on Wednesday issued notice to Muhammad Waqas, the chief executive of the Sunshine Engineering Company, for September 24. He denies that the generator was faulty and says it was being misused.

The petition was filed by Engineer Sajjad Husain Khan, a close associate of the former chief minister. The petitioner’s stated address is 12-B Aikman Road, GOR-1, which is the residence allocated to Khosa as a minister. According to the petitioner, the generator was bought for Rs172,000 on May 30. It developed faults and broke down soon after. The petitioner said that the company then charged them Rs26,400 for repairing the generator, which broke down again soon after.

He said that he had served a legal notice on the respondent on August 3, but he did not respond. He sought a new generator as well as Rs2,000,000 as compensation and damages.

Rana Tanveer, staff officer of the former chief minister, told The Express Tribune that they had purchased two generators from the company, one for Khosa’s Dera Ghazi Khan residence and the second for his GOR-1 residence. He said that the generator installed at GOR-1 did not work properly for a single day. He said that even after it was supposedly repaired at the company’s workshop, it did not work properly. When they sent it back for repairs, the workshop staff sought money for spare parts as two coils needed to be changed, he said. “Why should we pay for any sort of spare parts when we bought it brand new? They gave us a defective generator,” he said.

Waqas, the chief executive of Sunshine Engineering, said the problem was not with the generator, but with how it was being used. “I had warned them not to use more than two air conditioners on it. I sent one of my men to their house after they complained and he found they were running three or four ACs and other appliances. The generator simply does not have that much capacity,” he said.

He said that the generator was also not being maintained properly. “They were running it with oil in the tank. Generators need to be operated with care and sense, both of which were missing in those who operated it,” he said.

Waqas said that he would contest the case in court.



Published in The Express Tribune, September 8^th, 2011.