India's Finance Ministry accused the BBC of tax evasion on Friday, saying that it had not fully declared its income and profits from its operations in the country.
Indian tax authorities ended three days of searches of the British broadcaster's New Delhi and Mumbai offices on Thursday night. Opposition political parties and other media organizations have criticized the searches as an attempt to intimidate the media.
It said they found "several discrepancies and inconsistencies" and had gathered "crucial evidence" from statements of employees, digital evidence and documents which would be examined more fully later. The Press Trust of India news agency cited unnamed officials as saying on Thursday that investigators collected financial data from select BBC staffers and made copies of electronic and paper data from the news organization.
Reporters Without Borders, an international media watchdog, denounced the government's action as "attempts to clamp down on independent media." The program drew an immediate backlash from India's government, which invoked emergency powers under its information technology laws to block it from being shown in the country. Local authorities scrambled to stop screenings organized at Indian universities, and social media platforms including Twitter and YouTube complied with government requests to remove links to the documentary.
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