'Alt News Could Only Receive Domestic Payments': Razorpay Amid Zubair Probe

This comes after the Delhi Police said it had launched a probe into alleged FCRA violations by Alt News.

Mohammed Zubair was arrested on 28 June in connection with one of his tweets.

(Photo: PTI) 

Online payments platform Razorpay said on Friday, 8 July, that only domestic payments/donations were enabled for fact-checking website Alt News, while all foreign transactions, without approval under the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act, were not permitted.

This comes after the Delhi Police said last week that it had launched a probe into alleged FCRA violations by Alt News amid the case against its co-founder Mohammed Zubair.

Razorpay co-founder and CEO Harshil Mathur took to Twitter to say that the company had shared only "specific data" with the investigating authorities in connection with the case.

Without naming Alt News, he said, "While I am not allowed to share the specifics owing to the ongoing investigation, I want to state that the concerned business was only enabled to receive domestic payments in-line with our policy to not allow international transactions without FCRA approval for donation pages."

'Investigating Authorities Were Only Concerned With Foreign Donations': Mathur

This comes amid concerns regarding the data Razorpay shared with officials. However, Mathur said that the authorities only wanted to know whether the concerned company had received any foreign donations.

"Therefore donors’ PAN, address, pin code etc were not shared, which we believed were outside the scope of the investigation," the CEO said.

Reacting to the claim by the fact-checking website that they were not contacted before their information was shared, Mathur said that Razorpay had tried to reach them on their registered phone numbers, but were unable to.

However, he added, "In hindsight, we understand it may have been difficult for them to get on the phone in such a situation and we could have tried to find other channels."

"We immediately reached out to the authorities to understand the scope and reasons for the request. A Razorpay senior leader went from Bengaluru to Delhi to speak to the authorities. As is our process, we consulted multiple legal experts on this and got a unanimous view that we have to comply with the request," Mathur said.

Earlier, the payments gateway had disabled the business account of Alt News, and then re-enabled it. The fact-checking website, however, had claimed that it was not informed why its account was re-enabled a day after it was temporarily deactivated.

"As soon as we got that clarity, we immediately re-enabled payments for them," Mathur said.

Alt News' Zubair was arrested on 28 June in connection with a four-year-old tweet of his. While the investigation in the case is ongoing, the Uttar Pradesh Police is also probing a case registered against him for calling certain Hindutva leaders "hate-mongers" in a tweet.