MUMBAI, MAY 1 : 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.

Sharma had joined Air India’s UK office as regional director for the UK and rest of Europe. During his tenure between 2001 and 2006, revenue of the airline shot up to Rs 519 crore from Rs 197 crore in 2001, the highest recorded by the airline’s UK office ever. Sharma had relinquished official duty in the London office after serving for two additional years and just three days before the article appeared on August 3, 2006.

“The question of appeal is being considered with our lawyers. The court has given us 14 days to decide on the appeal,” said a spokesperson from The Evening Standard.

Sharma, who has now been promoted as executive director, sales & marketing and head of global operations, ground handling,

Air-India, will return to Mumbai next week to assume his new office. “Because I was trying to get the right things done in London for Air-India, people had problems with me,” he said. “My wife and daughter attended every single day of the trial to watch that rubbish.”