Alok Jena, petitioner in the chit fund scam in Odisha, has emphatically denied media reports saying the Supreme Court ‘dismissed’ his plea for monitoring of the ongoing CBI investigation into the mega scam in Odisha by the apex court. “The court has, in fact, ordered the listing of my case, for hearing on a date when Justice Thakur and Justice Nagappan are on the Bench,” Jena said over phone from New Delhi.
A quick check with the Supreme Court website revealed that Jena’s writ petition (413) of 2013, listed three times earlier, is ‘likely’ to be listed on April 27. The status of the case is clearly marked ‘pending’ on the website, corroborating Jena’s contention.
In the light of this revelation, it appears strange that several national level newspapers and websites and almost all vernacular television news channels kept parroting the ‘dismissal’ theory ad nauseam all evening.
All the reports published or broadcast had their origins in one source: a leading news agency report filed from Delhi. Jena claimed that the correspondent of the said agency was not even present in the court during the deliberations and surmised that the latter must have based his report on a secondary and obviously untrustworthy source.