New Delhi, March 14: Mathew Samuel, the man behind the cash-for-favours sting, today said he thought about the possibility of a story focusing on Trinamul leaders after the Saradha scam broke in Bengal.

He added that he wanted to avoid a BJP or a Congress target because he was known to be anti-BJP and anti-Congress.

Samuel, a Kerala native, during his cub reporter days in 2001 at tehelka.com had been part of the Operation West End sting, which had tried to expose the bribery behind defence deals. Several NDA leaders and defence officials were shown taking bribes.

"After Operation West End, I was called anti-BJP, and I was always known to be anti-Congress. So I was looking elsewhere for a story when the Saradha scam broke. It was the trigger that set me on the trail before the Lok Sabha elections in 2014 and soon I realised that the chit fund scam was only the tip of the iceberg," Samuel said.

But why did he wait this long? Was the video release timed for the Bengal elections?

Samuel, whose naradanews.com website launched today, said he fell ill while working on the story in 2014 owing to the water there.

"I came back to Delhi to recuperate. Around that time Tehelka's Tarun Tejpal was arrested in the sexual harassment case and K.D. Singh, Trinamul MP and owner of the publication, approached me to take over the magazine and reshape it. I was tempted by the offer to lead the magazine where I once worked as cub reporter," Samuel said. He became its managing editor.

Tejpal was arrested in December 2013 and given bail in July 2014.

When Samuel got the Tehelka offer, he told his Dubai-based financiers of the about-to-be-formed Narada website to put their plans on hold for a couple of years to go back to Tehelka.

"I promised them I would be back in two years and accordingly left Tehelka three months back to go back to the website project. We got the necessary clearances from the government a couple of weeks ago and registered the company here with an office in Dubai for the Malayalam operations," he said.

"Meanwhile, I went back to West Bengal and returned to the story," Samuel said, adding that some of the footage is recent.

The website functions out of a small basement in Noida.

"I believe in investing in content, not office paraphernalia," Samuel, who calls himself a degree dropout, said. "Naradanews.com will have features and other stories, but investigation will be its USP."

He said he never identifies himself as a journalist when he chats up people. "Which is probably why they open up to me. Operation West End began from a casual conversation which I had with a fellow traveller on a train journey from Pune to Mumbai," he recalled.

He listed his travails after the West End sting operation.

"I was thrown out of my rented house in Delhi two days after the sting was aired. Then because of the financial trouble that Tehelka had to face because of the sting operation, I went without a salary for eight months. I left Tehelka but could not settle in any job properly because I was entangled in court battles across the country..." he said.

Some friends in Dubai suggested a Malayalam website. Samuel preferred a national footprint, so he suggested that it be tri-lingual.

Learning from the Tehelka experience, when the government targeted its lone financier, Samuel and his friends opted for crowd-sourcing.