NEW DELHI: After the Supreme Court refused to ban a documentary linking Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the Gujarat riots, the Income Tax Department conducted raids at the BBC's Mumbai and Delhi offices. The raid comes weeks after the government came down hard against a BBC documentary critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's role in the 2002 riots.

The series of raids began with the raid conducted by Income Tax officers from Delhi at the BBC studio office in Kalina in Santa Cruz, Mumbai on Tuesday morning. After half an hour, eight officers reached the BBC office at KG Marg, Delhi. The raids under police guard continued till night.

The officials conducted the raid after locking the doors of the office. Staff, including foreigners, were not allowed to go out. The Income Tax officials collected data from account books, computers and mobile phones of employees.

Apart from English, BBC also has Hindi, Telugu, Marathi, Gujarati and Punjabi channels in India. There was no raid at the BBC office in Bandra West, Mumbai.

Conducted survey, not raid: Officials

Sources said the above exercise conducted by the tax authorities, is called "survey", not search or raid as per the provisions of the Income Tax Act. Such surveys are routinely conducted and are not to be confused to be in the nature of a search/raid, said sources. In the case of the BBC, sources said there has been persistent non-compliance with the above mentioned rules for years. As a result of the same, several notices have been issued to the BBC. However, the BBC has been continuously defiant and non-compliant and has significantly diverted its profits, sources said.

The key focus of these surveys is to look into the manipulation of prices for unauthorised benefits, including tax advantages. These surveys have been undertaken due to BBC's persistent non-compliance of the norms, making it a repeat offender. In this case, sources said BBC has been, "non-compliant under transfer pricing rules; persistent and deliberately violative of transfer pricing norms; and deliberately diverted a significant amount of the profits and have not followed the arm's length arrangement in the case of allocation of profit." Accordingly, the surveys have been conducted with a view to investigating BBC's violation of the Transfer Pricing Rules and its diversion of profits.