PANJIM: The complainant in the ‘Google Pay bribery case’, Nitesh Vengurlekar, is absolutely firm and insistent and refuses to back down and continues to seek justice.
Vengurlekar in a telephonic conversation with O Heraldo, has denied the purported statement of a two-wheeler garage owner Khafil Shaikh that Vengurlekar had taken his jeep there to get it repaired and the GooglePay of Rs 5,000 was in lieu of the repair charges.
“My vehicle is a brand new automatic Thar. It has hardly run 30,000 kilometres and it doesn’t require any repairs. And a roadside two-wheeler garage mechanic cannot even dream of touching it,” Vengurlekar said.
Sources said that the garage owner, who does his business right opposite the Agasaim police station, has stated that the payment was made for the repair of Vengurlekar’s jeep.
However, Vengurlekar categorically denied it and reiterated that he paid the bribe amount through GooglePay to Shaikh on the instruction of police constable Santosh.
It is pertinent to note that the Porvorim DySP is investigating severe allegations of harassment and extortion levelled against police personnel from the Agasaim police station by a family visiting the State from Delhi, and a Calangute-based businessman who had rented his jeep to the tourist family.
The family was put through a harrowing ordeal after a traffic stop led to them being left stranded on the highway at Agasaim, while on the way to the airport.
Vergurlekar said that his client is a VVIP from Noida and is extremely upset by the treatment meted out to him and his family.
It may be recalled that the jeep owner, Nitesh Vengurlekar, stated that he had deposited Rs 5,000 through GooglePay garage owner Khafil Shaikh on the instructions of police constable Santosh.
In his email complaint to Goa’s DGP and IGP, Noida resident Vijay Pratap Singh said he was stopped at a nakabandi in Agasaim at around 11.30 am on April 19, while he was driving to the airport in a jeep he had hired for the duration of his four-day stay in Goa.
Singh was accompanied by his wife and two children, aged one year and eight years. As the ‘self-drive’ car he had hired was a private vehicle, with a white licence plate, the Agasaim cops – two constables and one senior hawaldar – asked him to unload his luggage and his family and leave the vehicle at the police station to be picked up by the owner, Nitesh Vengurlekar.
