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After the office and residence of Raghav Bahl were raided by the Income Tax Department on October 11, the owner of The Quintillion Media Pvt Ltd has issued a statement for more clarification on the issue.
In his statement, Bahl said he would like to put out the “facts, and not claims for non-partisan and fair people in this world to judge for themselves".
Terming the raids a “clear frame-up”, Bahl stated that his organization will “take every legal recourse to protect our fair name and reputation” in this case.
Confident that his assets have been appropriately declared in the tax returns filings, Bahl has offered a detailed evaluation of his assets in his statement, including “Rs 33-odd lacs (sic) in modern and ancestral jewellery, almost entirely from my 82-year-old mother’s cupboard”.
Bahl also noted that income tax officers were “disappointed” when he told them that he had declared his LRS remittances in Schedule F of his income tax filings.
In his statement, he also mentioned that there were collateral surveys carried out by the IT department at his other investee companies. Questioning the motive of the same, Bahl said, “If the search/survey was linked to some transactions of ours that took place in 2014, then why were these investee companies searched in the same investigation?”
Read Also: Editor's Guild says motivated searches will undermine media freedom
“Clearly, it was a fishing expedition, to spread the net wide, and somehow, somehow, catch something,” he added. Bahl also pointed out that “digital experts used to clone data, and do other digital surveillance, during such raids, belong not to the tax department, but to private contractors!”
Concluding his statement, the media baron announced that they will take robust legal action “against every trumped-up charge” and warned his fellow news colleagues “to be vigilant against similar state vendetta”.
Income tax officials had conducted searches at Raghav Bahl’s Noida residence and his news portal office early on October 11. Soon after, the media baron had written to the Editor's Guild, saying, “While I was in Mumbai this morning, dozens of IT officials descended on my residence and The Quint’s office for a 'survey'. We are a fully tax compliant entity, and will provide all access to all appropriate financial documents.”
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