Controversial documentary on Modi: After Income Tax, ED registers case against BBC

The move comes in the wake of searches conducted by Income Tax at the offices of the British broadcaster in New Delhi and Mumbai in February this year

Team PGurus

April 13, 2023

The move comes in the wake of searches conducted by Income Tax at the offices of the British broadcaster in New Delhi and Mumbai in February this year

ED steps in to register FEMA case against BBC’s India

After the Income Tax raid, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) also registered a case on foreign exchange violations in money transfers against BBC’s India office. BBC faced the wrath of the Government of India soon after airing a controversial documentary on Prime Minister Narendra Modi, criticizing him for the Gujarat Riots of 2002.

The Enforcement Directorate has registered a FEMA case against news broadcaster BBC India for foreign exchange violations, officials said Thursday. The federal probe agency has also called for documents and the recording of statements of some company executives under provisions of the Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA), they said.

The probe is essentially looking at purported foreign direct investment (FDI) violations by the company, they said. The move comes in the backdrop of the Income-Tax Department surveying BBC office premises in Delhi in February.

The Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT), the administrative body for the I-T department, had then said the income and profits shown by various BBC Group entities were “not commensurate” with the scale of their operations in India and tax has not been paid on certain remittances by its foreign entities.

The agencies jumped on BBC after the broadcaster aired a controversial documentary portraying Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a bad light, accusing him of the Gujarat Riots of 2002, leading to Hindu-Muslim communal clashes and the death of more than 900 people.

On the Government of India’s instruction, Twitter and many other social media platforms blocked the BBC documentary.

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