The Supreme Court on Friday granted interim protection against any coercive action to two Financial Times journalists who had been summoned by the Gujarat Police in connection with an article on the Adani Group.
The apex court issued the notice on a petition filed by Benjamin Nicholas Brooke Parkin and Chloe Nina Cornish.
The journalists were summoned for a preliminary enquiry on a complaint filed by an investor in Adani Group companies in connection with the article published in the Financial Times titled “Secret paper trail reveals hidden Adani investors”.
The article alleged that two investors who pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into the Adani Group through offshore funds have close ties to the conglomerate’s promoters.
A bench of Justices BR Gavai and Prashant Kumar Mishra expressed displeasure about the petitioners approaching the Supreme Court directly. “This trend is now becoming very difficult,” said Justice Gavai. To this, Siddharth Agarwal, appearing for Parkin and Cornish, said that one petitioner is in Delhi, while the other is in Mumbai.
“The Gujarat Police have summoned them personally across the state borders, which your lordships have earlier said cannot be done,” he said. “In this context, because your lordships are already seized of the matter, instead of going to both the Delhi High Court and Bombay High Court, that is the reason I am troubling this court.”
The matter has been posted for December 1.
Last week, the Supreme Court had granted interim protection to journalists Ravi Nair and Anand Mangnale, who authored the report of Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. The Gujarat Police’s Ahmedabad Crime Branch sent a summons to Nair in connection with the article on October 16 and to Mangnale on October 25.
