New Delhi: A day after his name was dragged into the ongoing Lalit Modi-Sushma Swaraj controversy, Congress leader and former UPA minister Salman Khurshid on Tuesday denied that he tried to scuttle the former IPL chief's chances of staying in the UK.
“What have I done? Nobody put pressure on me, and no request was entertained,” Khurshid was quoted as saying by the ANI.
“What am I supposed to do as a minister? Help a person escape or help my government?” he added.
Addressing a press conference yesterday amid the raging controversy over External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj helping Lalit Modi secure travel documents from UK for Portugal to visit his ailing wife, the ex-IPL boss' lawyer Mehmood M Abdi blamed the Congress-led UPA government for putting his client in a "mess" and said that those languishing in a "political wilderness" are attacking his client.
"Attack on Lalit Modi is by people who are in political wilderness," he said.
"Shashi Tharoor, P Chidambaram and Salman Khurshid (all ministers in erstwhile UPA government) tried to scuttle his (Lalit Modi) chances of staying in UK by unduly interfering in legal process," Abdi told the media.
Lalit Modi came to know these facts through an RTI application filed in the UK, the counsel added.
Abdi defended Swaraj and said that his client's passport case was argued in UPA's tenure and hence there was no conflict of interest (on the minister's part) though the final order came after the government at the Centre changed last year.
"Why should she save him and for what? She had done it (help in getting travel papers) for human considerations. It is a very small thing but why is it being blown out of proportion?" Abdi asked.
The genesis of the controversy was disclosure of e-mails showing that Swaraj had spoken to Indian-origin British MP Keith Vaz and UK's High Commissioner to India James Bevan favouring the grant of travel documents to Lalit Modi to go to Portugal, purportedly for his wife's cancer treatment in June last year.
Modi, who is wanted in India, has made London his home since 2010 to avoid a probe for alleged foreign exchange regulation violations in the IPL T20 cricket tournament held in South Africa in 2009. The previous UPA government had revoked his passport and had pressed for his extradition.
