The alleged disappearance of 769 gold pots valued at approximately Rs.186 crore from the vaults of the Sree Padmanabhaswamy Temple here was a highly improbable story, one that has arisen from a misunderstanding, member of the royal family of erstwhile Travancore Aditya Varma has said.
He told The Hindu here on Tuesday that the report filed in the Supreme Court by the former Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) Vinod Rai was a unilateral effort. None of the members of the royal family or the temple treasurers past or serving had been consulted by Mr. Rai about the so-called missing gold pots.
“Some of the gold pots have been melted for use in Ottakkal Mandapam. The rest of the pots should, logically, be there in the vaults,” Mr. Varma said. It was also possible that some confusion arose because the pots were numbered in the Malayalam script. A wrong reading of these figures could have lead to the theory of the missing pots, he said.
The royal family was readying with its response to Mr. Rai’s report and would soon file the same in the Supreme Court, he added.
