Senior Advocate Anoop George Chaudhari has announced that he will no longer be appearing for Arvind Kejriwal in the civil defamation case filed against him by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley in the Delhi High Court.
Chaudhari, in his letter addressed to the instructing counsel Anupam Srivastav, stated that he is withdrawing from the case due to inadequate briefing which resulted in an embarrassing situation before Justice Rajiv Sahai Endlaw on February 12. The letter reads,
“Inspite of being aware of Justice Endlaw’s judgment disallowing suggestions being put to the witness in civil matters, questions were prepared by you which contained numerous suggestions to be put to Mr. Jaitley.”
During the last session of Jaitley’s cross examination, Justice Endlaw had dealt with the questions forwarded by Kejriwal’s lawyers with a dead bat and had asked the lawyers to rework the questions as they were non-specific and were being put to the witness in the form of suggestions.
Chaudhari’s letter stated that,
“Because of the lackadaisical and casual approach in briefing, the defendant is bound to suffer and I most certainly would not like to be a party to it.”
Earlier, Senior Advocate Ram Jethmalani had also quit as Arvind Kejriwal’s lawyer following their disagreement regarding the consent to use derogatory words like ‘crook’ for Jaitley during the cross examination.
Interestingly, Jethmalani too had announced his withdrawal from the case by writing a letter to Arvind Kejriwal in which he had alleged that Kejriwal used even more derogatory words for the Finance Minister.
Read Letter:
