Justice Nariman while delivering the inaugural Jitendra Desai Memorial Lecture on the topic ‘Freedom of Speech: Contemporary Challenges’ said that the banning of the malicious BBC documentary titled “India: The Modi Question” was wrong and shows that there is a long way to us to go when it comes to media freedom.
He also tried relating the tax raids conducted at the BBC office to the publishing of the documentary ignoring all the evidence that exists against BBC. BBC has a history of tax evasion not only in India but elsewhere too but Justice Nariman failed to consider the compelling evidence against the UK’s State-owned broadcaster.
Justice Nariman overlooked the reports published against BBC which list the financial malpractices that BBC engages in regularly.
BBC’s questionable practices and tax evasion
A 41-page official report by the Comptroller and Auditor General(of the UK) was released in November of 2018, which dived into the investigation of BBC’s engagement with personal service companies. It stated the types of people the BBC employed on a freelance basis and related problems involving such individuals, especially those it hires through personal service businesses.
The BBC was involved in yet another dispute in 2019. According to the BBC annual report, the media organization had set aside up to £12 million to settle the past tax debts of BBC broadcasters who HMRC was investigating for using personal service firms to evade taxes.
The National Audit Office (NAO), on the other hand, had questioned whether the payments were a proper use of BBC funds and as a result had provided a cautious assessment of the latter’s accounts.
The raids were conducted on BBC offices in Delhi and Mumbai for three days for:
- Non-compliant under transfer pricing rules
- Persistent and deliberate violation of transfer pricing norms; and
- Deliberately diverting a significant amount of the profits and having not followed the arm’s length arrangement in the case of allocation of profit.
The Ministry of Finance in its statement after the conclusion of the survey of BBC offices said that “a survey action under section 133A of the Income-t Act, 1961(the Act) was carried out at the business premises of group entities of a prominent international Media Company at Delhi and Mumbai.
The statement noted that BBC is engaged in the business of development of content in English, Hindi and various other Indian languages; advertisement sales and market support services, etc in India.
The statement said that the income/profits shown by various group entities under BBC India do not match their scale of operations in India, as the quantity of content in India is substantial. In the raid by the Income tax department, which has been described as a survey, several pieces of evidence were found that show that tax has not been paid on certain remittances which have not been disclosed as income in India by the foreign entities of the group.”
The ministry further informed that “the survey revealed that BBC India had made remittances to its foreign offices for utilising the services of seconded employees, or temporary employees sent from overseas. While such remittances are subjected to withholding tax, BBC avoided it.”
As far as the documentary is concerned, it was a clear case of a hit job, the SC of India has given a clean chit to PM Modi. Such documentaries only fulfil the agenda of creating unrest in the country and were rightly banned. The UK government itself has banned Russian state broadcasters like RT.
