Captain Ashwini Kumar Sharma, the man accused as a “serial sex pest” by The Evening Standard, a London- based newspaper, in August 2006, has won a libel case against the paper that accused him of harassing female staff and escaping punishment because of his “political links”.

The article published under the title “Sex Shame of Airline Chief” and with photographs of Sharma along with that of his

wife, Ajaya Sharma, also noted that incidents of sexual harassment were not new to him and that Sharma had faced internal inquiries in 2004.

But Wednesday’s verdict delivered unanimously by a 12-member jury of the

Royal Courts of United Kingdom, in a way, summed up all assertions made by the paper as mere assertions. Captain Sharma has also been awarded £85,000 in damages and another £500,000 in costs.

“There cannot be a better moment in my life,” said Captain Sharma, previously an Army officer and aide-de-camp to two former Indian Presidents, Giani Zail Singh and Neelam Sanjiva Reddy, before joining Air-India.

“The least that journalist (Amar Singh, who wrote the story) could have done was crosscheck the facts with me,” said Sharma who is grateful to his legal team for fighting his case without charging money in an otherwise extremely expensive trial. “I was pitched against this established company that had hired the best of lawyers.”

However, Ian Winter, Sharma’s lawyer from the Queens Council in the Royal Courts, said he had no doubt after meeting Sharma that he had done nothing wrong. “They were basically destroyed in the witness’s cross-examinations as there was never a word of truth in their allegations,” said Winter. He also happens to be the youngest lawyer in the Queens Council in the Royal Courts in the United Kingdom.

... contd.