Delhi Lieutenant Governor VK Saxena on Wednesday said he would take legal action against Aam Aadmi Party MLAs Atishi Marlena, Durgesh Pathak and Saurabh Bharadwaj, for “highly defamatory and false” corruption allegations against him, PTI reported.

The legislators have accused the lieutenant governor of changing his banned currency notes worth Rs 1,400 crore when he was the chairperson of the Khadi and Village Industries Commission in 2016. The notes were allegedly interchanged after Prime Minister Narendra Modi had devalued old currency notes in November 2016.

“This has been the hallmark of [Arvind] Kejriwal and co. to shoot and scoot and then when pushed for the truth, apologise,” Saxena’s office in a statement on Wednesday, NDTV reported.

It added: “The LG has taken a serious view of these blatantly false, defamatory and obviously diversionary allegations made by these AAP leaders and has decided to take legal action against them so that the AAP does not get away with its characteristic shoot and scoot.”

Legal action will also be taken against Jasmine Shah, the vice chairperson of the Dialogue and Development Commission of Delhi, officials said.

CBI inquiry into Khadi corruption

On Monday, Aam Aadmi Party MLA Durgesh Pathak had alleged that Saxena forced Khadi’s cashiers to exchange his old unaccounted banknotes, News18 reported. Two cashiers have exposed the scam, he added.

“But Vinai Kumar Saxena investigated their allegations and suspended the cashiers,” he said. “Saxena rinsed the allegations to an extent that CBI never even mentioned his name in their complaint.”

On Tuesday, the Central Bureau of Investigation had said that only two cashiers, Sanjeev Malik and Pradeep Kumar Yadav, who converted banned notes worth Rs 17 lakh were involved in the scam.

The investigation agency had filed a chargesheet against the cashiers in December 2017.

Malik and Yadav dishonestly exchanged old currency notes with new ones received through sales cashiers, the Central Bureau of Investigation had alleged in the first information report. It had added that the cashiers conspired to keep new currency notes and derived financial benefits by corrupt and illegal means.

The cashiers had also deposited “black money of some suspected officers in the bank accounts of Khadi Gram Udyog at State Bank of Bikaner and Jaipur, Connaught Circus Branch”, the FIR had claimed.