Tehelka seeks legal action against Samuel

MP | 1 April 2017 | Kolkata: The Tehelka magazine has decided to file a defamation suit against its former editor Mathew Samuel for "his attempts to malign the fair name of the media house". 

In a tweet, the media house stated: "Tehelka seeks legal action against Mathew Samuel. Tehelka is considering legal action against its former editor, Mathew Samuel for his attempts to malign the fair name of the media house." 

In a series of tweets Tehelka said: "Of late there have been attemps to denigrate its reputation by linking a sting conducted by Narada News headed by Mathew Samuel, with Tehelka, the organisation with which he had earlier worked. 

The legal cell of the media organisation is finalising the matter to take appropriate legal remedies against the sinister design of defaming its fair image." 

Though the reasons that how Samuel attempted to "malign the magazine" has not been stated in the tweets, it may be recalled that Narada News CEO, Samuel, had taken a u-turn from his previous stand while revealing the source of money for Narada sting operation to the Central Bureau of Investigation and claimed that Tehelka had funded the sting operation. 

Soon after the sting operation was released ahead of the Assembly polls in Bengal in 2016, Samuel had claimed that some of his friends from Dubai, US and Australia had funded the sting operation as they wanted to start a website. 

But while giving reply to questions of the Central investigating agency, after the Calcutta high court ordered a probe by the CBI into the case, he had claimed that Tehelka had given him Rs 80 lakh for the sting operation that he had initiated in March 2014. 

Incidentally, K D Singh, who is a Trinamool Congress Rajya Sabha MP, is a major shareholder of Tehelka and he was Samuel's boss when he was working for the magazine. But Samuel claimed that his boss was unaware of the sting operation on which he was working.