NEW DELHI, 25 April — The Internet website, tehelka.com which had exposed corruption in defense deals, yesterday claimed to have solved the riddle as to who was the man who had received the money in the presence of former Samata Party President Jaya Jaitley, at the official residence of the then Defense Minister George Fernandes.
The news portal has claimed that he was Gopal Pecherwal, Rajasthan unit chief of Samata Party, who had taken the money from its reporter Samuel Mathew.
The portal had earlier claimed that its team member had paid money to Samata Party leader and a Union minister Srinivas Prasad on the instruction of Jaya Jaitley.
The Samata Party chief had denied the charge and said that on the said day, Prasad was not even in Delhi. “He was away on a tour of Karnataka,” she had claimed.
Conceding that it had made a “slip-up” earlier, Tehelka said yesterday that “its reporter had never seen Prasad before and had presumed that Gopal Pecherwal, also a stranger to him, was Prasad — and Jaya Jaitley had, after all, told him to hand over the money to Prasad.”
The news portal however, said Pacherwal was not fully captured by its camera as its field of vision was limited to a frontal view, while he was on the right in the room. Claiming that Pacherwal had been kept under strict security and had virtually gone into hiding since the scandal broke out, the portal said that it was only Pacherwal, Jaya Jaitley herself and her inner coterie who knew all along that Pacherwal had taken the money.
The Tehelka investigation team could achieve a breakthrough only in tracking down Pacherwal by one of them posing as a businessman from Madhya Pradesh. He was traced in his native place, Keshav Rai Patan, nearly 30 km away from Kota in Rajashtan. Reacting to the portal’s claim, Jaya Jatley said that all evidence and allegations would be examined by the Justice Venkataswamy Commission probing the scandal. The party’s response to the portal’s claims would also be presented to the commission.
