PTI, NEW DELHI: A Delhi court Tuesday agreed to examine a complaint filed by NSA Ajit Doval’s son Vivek Doval seeking action against a magazine for alleged defamatory article and senior Congress leader Jairam Ramesh for using that content to “deliberately maligne and defame” him to “settle scores with his father”.
The complaint, which has named The Caravan as also the author of the article, will come up for hearing on January 30, when the court will record the statements of the witnesses named by Vivek Doval.
Besides Vivek Doval, there are two other witnesses — his friend Nikhil Kapoor and business partner Amit Sharma — who will record their statements in support of the criminal defamation complaint.
The complaint alleged that the article had termed the companies run by Vivek as “D-Companies”, which was a very demeaning name for him and for the entire country.
“Please take cognisance of my complaint. Defamatory material was published against me,” advocate D P Singh, appearing for Vivek Doval, told Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Samar Vishal.
When the counsel made reference of D-Company, the judge said, “What does it (D-Company) mean?”
The counsel said it is about underworld don Dawood Ibrahim, who is a fugitive, and is running illegal activities from abroad.
“A number of movies have been made using this name (D-Company) to indicate Dawood,” the counsel said.
According to the complaint, Ramesh had held a press conference on January 17 reiterating the “baseless and unfounded facts” as narrated in the article.
The Caravan in its January 16 online write-up titled ‘The D Companies’ had said that Vivek Doval, “runs a hedge fund in the Cayman Islands” which is “an established tax haven” and was “registered merely 13 days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government demonetised all existing Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 currency notes, in 2016”.
He had alleged that the contents of the article present “no illegality” on his part, but the entire narration has been presented in a manner, which suggests “wrongdoings” to the readers.
