Polayil Joseph Thomas(born 13 January 1951) is a 1973 batch Indian Administrative Service officer from Kerala cadre.
As the chief electoral officer, Thomas was instrumental in introducing electronic voting machine in all stages of election.
The 3G Spectrum auction happened when Thomas was the Telecom Secretary and helped the government earn a revenue two times than what analysts predicted.
Thomas had stressed that the spectrum planned by the Department of Space is crucial to meeting the strategic requirements of nation and hence it should not be frittered away by giving it to private parties and that too not without following the process of auction to maximise the government revenue.
In 1991, the state government had decided to import palm oil from Power and Energy Limited, a company based in Singapore.
[4] In 1996, the LDF government came to power, and resurrected the matter by causing an FIR to be filed against Karunakaran and six others under various sections of the Prevention of Corruption Act.
[9] The long stay in this case eventually became detrimental to Thomas, as his appointment to the post of CVC was mired with controversies on whether the pending charge-sheet was discussed by the High Powered Committee.
On 3 March 2011, the Supreme Court quashed the appointment of Thomas as the Chief Vigilance Commissioner, noting that the HPC did not consider the relevant materials on the pending charge-sheet.
The basis for the request for the review petition, according to Thomas's lawyer, Wills Mathews, was that the three judges' judgement on the CVC is not legally valid because Article 145 (3) says that the minimum number of judges required for interpretation of Constitution is five, which in effect makes the Supreme Court judgement null and void.