Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) leader and Lok Sabha MP from Sultanpur Varun Gandhi has dismissed the “honey trap” allegations levelled against him by US-based arms agent Edmonds Allen, saying “there is not one grain of truth and or one shred of evidence”. In a letter, which he released on Twitter on Saturday, Varun said his family and he have been “deeply traumatized by these lies” and he was taking “legal recourse against those who have deliberately sought to tarnish my reputation and public standing”.
Allen, in a letter to the Prime Minister, had alleged that Varun had been blackmailed into revealing information from the Defence Consultative Committee, allegedly using pictures of him with “foreign escorts”.
Varun said in his letter that though he was a member of both the Defence Standing Committee and the Defence Consultative Committee from 2009, he never attended a single meeting of the Defence Consultative Committee and very few of the Standing Committee. He said, in any case, there is never “confidential or top secret” information accessible to such parliamentary panels. “As a first time opposition MP, I could not, and I did not have any access to any sensitive defence information, so the question of being allegedly coerced into revealing anything does not even arise,” he added in the letter.
Varun also made it clear that he never met Edmonds Allen. “Nor do I have any details of who he is, nor what he does expect as has been reported in the press of him being a former associate of Mr Abhishek Verma,” he said.
Talking about Abhishek Verma, the BJP leader said: “I first made acquaintance with Verma when I was a college student in England. He was introduced as the son of late Smt. Veena and Shri Shrikant Verma, both MPs, from a well respected family. We met socially over a short period of time. It has been many years since we last met. At no point did we ever discuss work, neither his nor mine.” “According to media reports, Allen and Verma had some business dealing that went sour. It would seem that a disgruntled Allen is now seeking maximum publicity for his charges against his erstwhile associate. He is there naming public figures like myself in order to attract greater public attention for his grievances, real or imagined. I have needlessly been sought to be embroiled into a controversy in which I have no part,” Varun mentioned in his letter.