NEW DELHI - Senior Supreme Court advocate K.T.S Tulsi Monday denied handing over a Punjab vigilance bureau report on alleged corruption in the state’s higher judiciary to Union Law Minister M. Veerappa Moily and recommending that he take up the matter with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
“I did meet the minister but the meeting had nothing to do with the Punjab vigilance bureau report,” said Tulsi.
“I neither handed him any report nor recommended to him to take up the matter with the prime minister,” he said.
“Do I have any locus standi in a matter that involves the state and the central governments and the Chief Justice of India? I had met the law minister but it was for a private purpose,” Tulsi added.
Since the last week the media has been agog about a Punjab Vigilance Bureau report based on telephone surveillance of suspected militants that alleged a murky nexus between touts and judges.
As per the report, the bureau had recorded telephonic conversation among militants talking of judges who would fix the outcome of court verdicts for money.
The report said the Punjab government had forwarded the report to the Prime Minister’s Office and to the law ministry. It also said the union government was mulling action on the report.
Law Minister Moily on Friday denied “receiving any report from any quarter, including the PMO or the state government”.
Speaking to reporters after release of a book “Unleashing India”, authored by him, Moily had said, “I have not received any report from any quarter whatsoever on the Punjab judiciary.”
Advocate Tulsi, meanwhile, also denied that a three-member judicial panel, constituted by the Chief Justice of India K.G. Balakrishnan, had recommended impeachment of Justice Nirmal Yadav of the Punjab and Haryana High Court for allegedly being the intended beneficiary of a hefty sum of cash that was mistakenly delivered at the door of another woman judge Nimaljit Kaur last year.
“This is also contrary to records,” said Tulsi, who had acted as legal counsel to one of the judges involved in the scam.
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