THE WEEK in its issue dated December 17, 2017 published a special report, ‘Money, and The Man’, on the assets possessed by Tamil Nadu’s Deputy Chief Minister O. Panneerselvam. The special report also contained one of the pages of the infamous ‘Sekar Reddy Diary’, which had details of pay-offs allegedly made by the popular businessman J. Sekar Reddy of JSR Infra and SRS Mining to the deputy chief minister. THE WEEK ran the image of one of the pages of the alleged diary and mentioned the entries in the same.
It was not the intention of THE WEEK to publish any story about Sekar Reddy or his companies without giving him an opportunity to express his opinion. The report was primarily about the assets of Panneerselvam, and no remarks of Reddy could be obtained before the article went to print. However, subsequently THE WEEK met Sekar Reddy and asked him to speak on the diary. “I don’t have the habit of writing any diary and the pages published in THE WEEK are not part of any diary written by me or my office staff. It is not my handwriting,” Reddy told THE WEEK. Reiterating that it was not any account book or any daily entry notebook maintained at his office staff, he said, “We are into business for more than 10 years and I am regular taxpayer. I have paid an advance tax.”
When I asked him to clarify about the account book maintained at his office, he said, “There are no such entries made by my office staff in any of my companies.” Replying to yet another query on the reports published in the media about the Income Tax department sending copies of the account books to the higher officials in the government for an inquiry, Reddy explained that “the reports are wrong as there was no such diary.”
