HYDERABAD: A division bench of the AP High court comprising Justice V Eswaraiah and Justice P Swaroop Reddy on Monday granted time to the AP Industrial Infrastructure Corporation (APIIC) to file its counter in a letter addressed by minister P Shanker Rao to the court on the Emaar issue. The court has taken up the letter as a writ petition.
In the letter addressed to the chief justice, the minister had complained that the state government had failed to take proper action on the Emaar row. The letter, written before Shanker Rao became a minister, also sought a CBI inquiry into the allegations of various irregularities in the Emaar-APIIC deals. Recently, a single judge of the court had stayed final action against the company on a notice issued by it.
Notice to Telugu daily
Justice L Narasimha Reddy of the AP High court on Monday ordered notice to the editor and the district head of the Visakhapatnam unit of the Telugu daily, Andhra Jyothi, in a contempt case. The case follows publication of a news item in the daily’s Vishakapatnam edition regarding the orders made by the court in a service matter of the engineering staff of the Zilla Parishad.
The judge ordered a suo moto notice. First, the district collector was summoned but he informed the court that he had no role in the comments and had not attended the said meeting. The comments were then attributed to MLA M. Srinivasa Rao, who presented himself before the court and denied the allegations. The court took cognizance of the counter affidavit filed by the editor and voiced serious concern at the insistent comments of the contemnors. The defence that the information mentioned in the news was ‘in public domain’ and the tenor of the defence that it was a fair comment did not find prima facie acceptance by the judge. Special government pleader S Sriram said that such defences were not available under the Contempt of Courts Act. The judge ordered the presence of the contemnors on Jan 28.
Stay on newspaper title vacated
Justice Naushad Ali of the AP High Court on Monday vacated an earlier interim order freezing the title ‘Namaste Telangana’ in favour of Dr Goka Sridhar, the editor of the local tabloid, Deccan Post. The judge vacated the order at the instance of rival claimant D Damodar Rao. The writ petition filed by Sridhar contended that the action of the Registrar of Newspapers was contrary to law as he was the prior applicant. On an application seeking to vacate the interim order, Justice Naushad Ali agreed with the contention that the petitioner failed to produce sufficient material that the title was not a free title.