The elections for the key posts of South Indian film Chamber of Commerce (SIFCC) were held yesterday and the results have been announced today. Sashikumar from Kerala has been elected as the new President. Katragadda Prasad and Arulprasad are elected as secretaries, while K Muralidharan is the new Treasurer.

Actor Kamal Haasan is one of the stars who have voted in the SIFCC election. Many associations related to Tamil cinema industry including the Tamil Film Producers Council have boycotted the SIFCC elections. A few of them have called for a separate governing body for Tamil film industry instead of SIFCC.

SIFCC was started with the intentions of sorting out the issues in all the four South Indian Film Industries. While Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam film industries have started their separate chambers it is being alleged that Tamil film industry’s issues are being overlooked by the Chamber.

Another reason cited by Tami Film Producer’s council’s President Keyaar for boycotting the elections relate to the chamber allowing the nomination of two candidates for the post of President. He had said, the candidature for the SIFCC presidentship was rotated on an annual basis to accommodate representatives of the four South Indian film industries viz. Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam. Hence the election for Presidentship of SIFCC has been a mere formality.

This year it was Malyalam film industry’s turn and they had proposed the name of Producer G.Vijayakumar. But the chamber has broken the accepted norms and allowed another candidate Sashikumar to contest in the election.