Niira Radia has a chat with Noel Tata on June 18, 2009, discussing the media plan for Trent Ltd’s board agreeing to renew his managing director contract for another five years. “These are the times when the fact that I never speak to anybody come to my rescue,” says Noel Tata. Radia replies, “Which is why I stopped the BusinessWorld story and shifted it to Business Today, because I got the questions I wanted….and not the questions that they wanted.”
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The contents of a fresh set of leaked phone conversations involving Niira Radia and her associates paint an alarming picture of the extent to which the influential lobbyist — whose clients include Mukesh Ambani and Ratan Tata — sought to influence, use, manipulate and even browbeat the media in pursuit of her corporate agendas. Apart from highlighting the use of journalists to plant stories and columns or as intermediaries with politicians, the latest tapes released by the news magazine, Outlook, suggest more strong-arm lobbying techniques were also used or considered, including the possibility of blacklisting the national news agency, PTI.
Outlook, which had earlier published 140 conversations originally intercepted by the Income Tax department as part of its ongoing surveillance of Ms. Radia, now says it has 800 more conversations in its possession. Nineteen of those audio tapes, with partial summaries, were published on its website by Sunday evening. Editor Vinod Mehta said that all the tapes were being vetted, and eventually would be put in the public domain, except for those which were purely private conversations.
In one tape, HT Media advisor Vir Sanghvi has a follow-up conversation with Ms. Radia regarding his June 21, 2009 column in the Hindustan Times on the tussle between the Ambani brothers over gas pricing, framed as an article about oligarchs taking over natural resources.
“Wrote it… I’ve dressed it up as a piece about how the public will not stand for resources being cornered, how we’re creating a new list of oligarchs,” Mr. Sanghvi tells Ms. Radia. “Very nice, lovely, thank you, Vir,” she says, while he adds: “It’s dressed up as a plea to Manmohan Singh, so it won’t look like an inter-Ambani battle except to people in the know.”
http://hindu.com/2010/12/13/stories/2010121357060100.htm
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