Deccan Chronicle to move court against arrest of chairman, vice chairman

Tikkavarapu Venkatram Reddy, 54, the high profile and flamboyant Chairman of Deccan Chronicle Holdings (DCHL), and his brother and Vice Chairman T Ravi Vinayak Reddy were arrested by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Saturday in an alleged bank loan default case.

Deccan Chronicle, one of the leading newspapers of South India that the company runs, has put out a sharp reaction to the move calling it illegal: "DCHL intends to fight out the illegal arrest of its company directors in the courts," it says.

It argues that the CBI neither produced a warrant not recorded the reasons for the arrest. Instead, it says the CBI chose to take the Reddy brothers to the house of a magistrate at 9 pm on Saturday.

The arrests have been made in connection with a case registered in 2013 following a complaint lodged by Canara Bank, which was one of the stakeholders in the company, alleging loan default.

The newspaper, in a lead article on the front page, argues that "there is no basis for the CBI to concluding that the DCHL chiefs are likely to tamper with evidence or threaten witnesses now, when it has not happened even once in the last two years.....and the company chiefs have always cooperated with the investigation".

DCHL, one of the first family-owned mainline broadsheets to go public, has been showing losses for the past couple of years. While the company has not declared results for the last nine months,  going by what is posted on the Bombay Stock Exchange website, the company showed a heavy net loss of Rs 1,040.41 crore on revenues of Rs 786.08 crore in 2012. In 2013, it posted a net loss of Rs 14.06 crore on a lower revenue of Rs 301.05 crore.