No top court relief for Times Now

Nov 14, 2011 |

IANS

New Delhi

Tags:

media

The Supreme Court on Monday declined to interfere with a Bombay High Court order directing Times Global Broadcasting Co. to deposit Rs20 crore with the high court registrar along with a Rs80 crore bank guarantee in a Rs100 crore defamation suit filed by a retired apex court judge.

The high court set the deposit of money as a pre-condition for taking up the company's appeal challenging the award of Rs100 crore damages to former apex court judge P.B. Sawant by a Pune court.

The apex court bench of Justice G.S. Singhvi and Justice S.J. Mukhopadhaya said: "We are not inclined to stay the high court order".

Times Global Broadcasting was asked to pay damages to Justice Sawant for wrongly carrying his image on the Times Now news channel while telecasting a story on the Ghaziabad district court provident fund scam Sep 10, 2008 in which the name of a Calcutta High Court judge had allegedly figured.

The Pune trial court held Time Now guilty of wrongly showing the picture of Justice Sawant and directed it to pay him Rs100 crore damages.

The Bombay High court directed the Times Now to deposit Rs20 crore with the high court registrar and furnish bank surety of Rs80 crore.

Declining to interfere with the high court order, the court said that the order was conditional.

Senior counsel Harish Salve, who appeared for the Times Global Broadcasting Co., sought a stay on the high court order stating that serious questions were arising from it.

Salve questioned how the damages of Rs100 crore were quantified.

Post new comment

<form action="/comment/reply/107276" accept-charset="UTF-8" method="post" id="comment-form"> <div><div class="form-item" id="edit-name-wrapper"> <label for="edit-name">Your name: <span class="form-required" title="This field is required.">*</span></label> <input type="text" maxlength="60" name="name" id="edit-name" size="30" value="Reader" class="form-text required" /> </div> <div class="form-item" id="edit-mail-wrapper"> <label for="edit-mail">E-Mail Address: <span class="form-required" title="This field is required.">*</span></label> <input type="text" maxlength="64" name="mail" id="edit-mail" size="30" value="" class="form-text required" /> <div class="description">The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.</div> </div> <div class="form-item" id="edit-comment-wrapper"> <label for="edit-comment">Comment: <span class="form-required" title="This field is required.">*</span></label> <textarea cols="60" rows="15" name="comment" id="edit-comment" class="form-textarea resizable required"></textarea> </div> <fieldset class=" collapsible collapsed"><legend>Input format</legend><div class="form-item" id="edit-format-1-wrapper"> <label class="option" for="edit-format-1"><input type="radio" id="edit-format-1" name="format" value="1" class="form-radio" /> Filtered HTML</label> <div class="description"><ul class="tips"><li>Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.</li><li>Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd></li><li>Lines and paragraphs break automatically.</li></ul></div> </div> <div class="form-item" id="edit-format-2-wrapper"> <label class="option" for="edit-format-2"><input type="radio" id="edit-format-2" name="format" value="2" checked="checked" class="form-radio" /> Full HTML</label> <div class="description"><ul class="tips"><li>Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.</li><li>Lines and paragraphs break automatically.</li></ul></div> </div> </fieldset> <input type="hidden" name="form_build_id" id="form-5842ad4db4c53cc327322eb50f1f9336" value="form-5842ad4db4c53cc327322eb50f1f9336" /> <input type="hidden" name="form_id" id="edit-comment-form" value="comment_form" /> <fieldset class="captcha"><legend>CAPTCHA</legend><div class="description">This question is for testing whether you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.</div><input type="hidden" name="captcha_sid" id="edit-captcha-sid" value="91443740" /> <input type="hidden" name="captcha_response" id="edit-captcha-response" value="NLPCaptcha" /> <div class="form-item"> <div id="nlpcaptcha_ajax_api_container"><script type="text/javascript"> var NLPOptions = {key:'c4823cf77a2526b0fba265e2af75c1b5'};</script><script type="text/javascript" src="http://call.nlpcaptcha.in/js/captcha.js" ></script></div> </div> </fieldset> <span class="btn-left"><span class="btn-right"><input type="submit" name="op" id="edit-submit" value="Save" class="form-submit" /></span></span> </div></form>