The campaigning for the December 21 RK Nagar by-election began in a stormy note on Friday with some of the television news channels unleashing a blitzkrieg about cash transactions between a Chennai based mining baron and some of the Ministers in the Edappadi Palanisamy Government in Tamil Nadu.
The channels telecast the news with the claim that they were in possession of diary notes made by mining baron Sekhar Reddy about huge amount of cash running to crores given by him to the Ministers. But Sekhar Reddy refuted the allegations and said that he was not in the habit of writing diaries. He also told the channels that they were free to check the authenticity of the handwritings in the documents which they claimed were under their possession.
Sekhar Reddy was in the news immediately after the November 6, 2016 demonetization of high value currency notes by the Government of India. Residences and business premises of Reddy were raided by the authorities of the Income Tax department and there were reports about seizure of new currency notes as well as gold and incriminating documents.
During a search conducted by the Income Tax authorities at various places in the last year, a sum of Rs 12 lakhs demonetised currency notes were only found from the residence of our client Sekar Reddy and the other demonetised and new currency notes were seized from the premises of our client’s firm which sum was generated from its legitimate business operations. Further the firm has remitted a sum of Rs 31 crore as advance income tax for the same,” the lawyers of Reddy had said in a release on December 3, 2017.
S Saravanan, the lawyer representing Reddy served on Friday a legal notice to a Kerala based news magazine which published malicious report about the business dealings between Reddy and a leading AIADMK leader in its latest issue.
While the mining baron refuted all claims made by the TV channels, Abdul Salim, an associate of the legal firm representing Reddy told this newspaper that his office was working out a legal notice to be served on the news channels for “airing malicious and unsubstantiated news”.
All major opposition parties in Tamil Nadu, including the DMK working president M K Stalin demanded the Governor of Tamil Nadu to take immediate action and ordera CBI probe into the revelations made by the news channel.
“This will form the ammunition for the by-election campaign. We will focus all our energy to being out the truth behind the revelations made by the magazine and the channel against the Palaniswamy government and deputy chief minister Panneerselvam,” said one of the DMK leaders.
While most of the Ministers named by the channels remained silent over the issue, K C Palanisamy, close confidante of Panneerselvam told The Pioneer that the news reports were unsubstantiated and frivolous and would not make any impact on the December 21 RK Nagar by-election.