904-NMS-1220-15-F4.DOC 7. Whether comment was sought from the plaintiff. He may have information others do not possess or have not disclosed. An approach to the plaintiff will not always be necessary. 8. Whether the article contained the gist of the plaintiff’s side of the story. 9. The tone of the article. A newspaper can raise queries or call for an investigation. It need not adopt allegations as statements of fact. 10. The circumstances of the publication, including the timing. It matters little, I think, whether or not this is taken as a lodestar for assessment in such cases. What is relevant is that these observations, a little over a decade and a half ago, seem oddly prescient today. Consider items 2, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 9. Each of these seems to have an echo in the case before me. That must surely be enough. Even if we do not adopt the Reynolds defence as an absolute standard, the decision nonetheless contains valuable guides to a judicial assessment in a case such as this. 23. With that, I return to the tests in Wadia J’s decision in Mitha Rustomji Murzban. What would a reasonable person used to dealing in financial markets make of the fact that Ms. Dalal had sent this query and this letter to the NSE and sought its responses not once but three times and received no response? I believe the response of any such person might be substantially along the lines of what the Defendants said, though perhaps others may not have put it quite in the same fashion. That does not make the article complained of defamatory per se. I am unable to understand how it can be possibly 24 of 30 ::: Uploaded on - 10/09/2015 ::: Downloaded on - 03/02/2020 18:08:37 :::