'Our laws are transparent': Hardeep Singh Puri after BBC admits it paid lower taxes in India

Hours after it was reported that the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) had admitted it paid lower taxes in India, Union Minister Hardeep Singh Puri on Tuesday said that the country's tax laws are very transparent but some people tried to make it a freedom of expression issue.

In February, the Income Tax department surveyed the offices of BBC in Delhi and Mumbai. However, the opposition linked the action with BBC's two-part documentary on the Gujarat riots. The Congress in a tweet said: "First came the BBC documentary, it was banned. Now I-T has raided BBC. Undeclared Emergency."

Today, Puri responded to the critics, saying: "Our laws are very transparent. If someone is not paying tax and we send them notice, they say it is an issue of Freedom of the Press."

Without naming anyone but in an apparent reference to Congress, the minister said he would not like to go into details but some of their actions in the past made it seem that "they were in the hands of people with an agenda on India".

BBC has admitted that it has been paying lower taxes in India as compared to its liability, according to The Times of India. "It is only a statement of intent so far; there is no payment," states the report.

On February 17, the I-T department issued a statement regarding its survey operations on BBC offices in Mumbai and New Delhi. It said the survey revealed that despite substantial consumption of the media company's content in various Indian languages (apart from English), the income/profits shown by various group entities were not commensurate with the scale of operations in India.

"During the course of the survey, the Department gathered several evidences pertaining to the operation of the organization which indicate 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," it said.

The tax agency said it also found that services of seconded employees had been utilised for which reimbursement had been made by the Indian entity to the foreign entity concerned. "Such remittance was also liable to be subject to withholding tax which has not been done. Further, the survey has also thrown up several discrepancies and inconsistencies with regard to Transfer Pricing documentation."