Unaccounted Currency Notes Were Recovered From Official Residence
New Delhi: The three-member inquiry committee headed by Supreme Court Judge Aravind Kumar has asked Justice Yashwant Varma, facing removal motion in the Lok Sabha in the aftermath of discovery of wads of burnt and unaccounted currency notes from his official residence, to respond to the memo of charges against him.In its Dec 5 proceedings, Justice Varma sought eight more weeks to respond to the charges of misconduct framed against him by the committee – comprising Justice Kumar, Madras HC Chief Justice M M Srivastava and senior advocate B V Acharya – that was constituted under the Judges (Inquiry) Act on Aug 12 by LS Speaker Om Birla pursuant to a removal motion signed by 146 MPs.The committee granted Justice Varma six more weeks to file a detailed response to the charges and said no further time would be granted to him for this purpose. The proceedings are scheduled to resume in the last week of Jan.The inquiry panel has supplied the memo of charges along with evidence, mainly comprising videos of the burning cash recorded by Delhi Police and Delhi Fire Service personnel on the night of March 14-15 while dousing a fire in a room inside the judge’s Lutyens Zone bungalow and statements of witnesses recorded by the in-house inquiry conducted by another three-member panel set up by former CJI Sanjiv Khanna. During the proceedings before the inquiry panel, constituted by the LS speaker, Justice Varma will have the opportunity to counter the charges, produce witnesses in support of his innocence and can cross examine witnesses supporting the memo of charges against him. A week after the discovery of the cash on his residential premises, Justice Varma was transferred from Delhi HC to his parent HC at Allahabad. He has been stripped of judicial work since then.On March 22, then CJI Khanna set up a three-member in-house inquiry panel comprising Punjab and Haryana Chief Justice Sheel Nagu, Himachal Chief Justice G S Sandhawalia and Karnataka HC’s Justice Anu Sivaraman. This panel had submitted its report dated May 3 to the CJI on May 5.The in-house panel had rejected Justice Varma’s defence that the cash had been planted to defame and discredit him, and said that it “has no hesitation in holding that in the backdrop of direct as well as electronic evidence of unimpeachable character, further corroborated by the evidence of the experts, the issue of presence of cash in the storeroom situated within 30, Tughlaq Crescent, New Delhi, is established.” It had recorded that the electronic evidence, mainly comprising videos and still photographs taken by the first responders, were found to be authentic by the Central Forensic Laboratory, Chandigarh.The panel’s 64-page report had recorded that wads of half-burnt 500 currency notes in Justice Varma’s official residence storeroom were cleaned up in the early hours of March 15 by “trusted servants” under the supervision of his private secretary after he talked on phone with the judge, who was out of station.
