-Pegasus offer given but TDP rule rejected it
-DGP RTI reply in 2021 vindicated Naidu regime
-Sawang’s office clarified spyware was never procured
Amaravati, March 18: “We have never purchased any Spyware. We never indulged in any illegal phone tapping,” Telugu Desam Party general secretary Nara Lokesh said here on Friday.
Reacting to West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s claim that the previous Chandrababu Naidu government purchased the Pegasus Spyware, Lokesh retorted, “She was misinformed”.
“I don’t know whether she has indeed said that, and where and in which context. If she did say that, she is certainly misinformed,” Lokesh, who was the then Minister for Information Technology in his father Chandrababu’s Cabinet, observed.
Chandrababu Naidu would never indulge in such illegal acts, he asserted.”Yes, Pegasus offered to sell its Spyware to the AP government as well but we rejected it,” Lokesh said.
Had the government purchased the Spyware, there would be a record of it, he pointed out.
“If there had been any such thing, would the (current) Jagan regime have spared us? In the last three years they have tried every trick to fix us in one thing or the other but failed, because we did nothing wrong,” the TDP MLC maintained.
“If indeed we had Pegasus, would Jagan have gone scot-free, for all his atrocious acts,” Lokesh wondered.Nara Lokesh asserted that the RTI reply of former DGP Gautham Sawang’s office was a clear vindication of the previous TDP Government regarding the ‘Pegasus software’ allegations.
Lokesh said the DGP office clarified on August 12, 2021, itself that the AP Government had ‘never procured’ Pegasus software. This was in reply to the RTI application dated July 25, 2021, sent by one Nagendra Prasad, a resident of Yemmiganur, Kurnool district.
Nara Lokesh said the RTI application had asked for details of the sanction letter for procuring Pegasus spyware, the office where it was installed and officers in charge of it. In a single sentence reply, Sawang’s office replied to Nagendra Prasad that the State had ‘never procured such software’.
