Alt News Data Sharing Controversy: Have To Comply With Legal Requests, Says Razorpay CEO

Responding to the Alt News controversy, Razorpay CEO and cofounder Harshil Mathur on Friday (July 8) said that the “specific data” it shared with the investigating authorities was only restricted to “what was within the scope of investigation”.

“In this case, the specific scope was to determine whether there were any foreign donations or not and therefore donors’ PAN, address, pin code etc were not shared, which we believed were outside the scope of investigation,” Mathur said in a statement on Twitter.

The statement also said that Alt News was only enabled to receive domestic payments in line with the startup’s policy to not allow international transactions without FCRA approval for donation pages.

The statement comes days after Razorpay started getting flak for suspending fact-checking platform Alt News’ payment links used for donations and admitting to sharing its donors’ data with the investigating agency after Delhi Police arrested its cofounder Mohammed Zubair last month. 

Zubair was arrested in an alleged case of posting an “objectionable tweet” in 2018. During the hearing on his bail application, public prosecutor Atul Shrivastava said that Alt News had received funds from foreign bank accounts in UAE, Pakistan, Syria, Singapore, and Australia. 

Alt News later claimed that Razorpay shared the company’s donor data with the investigative authority, without adequate consent.

In his statement, Mathur said that on Monday, which must be July 4, Razorpay received a written notice for transaction data of a specific business (Alt News) for a specific time period under Section 91 of CrPC for FCRA investigation.

The payments unicorn reached out to the authorities immediately in an attempt to understand the scope and reasons for the request. To that end, a Razorpay senior leader went from Bengaluru to Delhi to speak to the authorities. In the due process, the startup also consulted multiple legal experts and got a unanimous view to comply with the request, the statement said.

“We temporarily disabled the business account awaiting clarity on the purpose of investigation, in-line with our policy, to safeguard and prevent consumer losses. As soon as we got that clarity, we immediately re-enabled payments for them,” Mathur said.

“We are a regulated financial organisation, our licence to do business places us under a strict obligation to abide by the laws of the country without any leeway. The regulations require us to comply with every lawful order of authorities,” he said. “The consequences of not doing so can range from losing our licence to our accounts being frozen – which will adversely impact millions of small businesses & customers, who rely on.”

Mathur also noted how Razorpay has been enabling over 8 Mn small businesses in India to accept payments and get access to credit and banking through the Razorpay platform. 

“In the last few days, my team and I have personally reached out to policy experts and legal counsels across the country to re-evaluate if we inadvertently acted in haste or missed a step. We got an undivided view that it was necessary for us to comply with the legal request,” he said. 

He also added that Razorpay has always championed the need for an appropriate data privacy law in the country and continues to make efforts for it by participating in various forums and partnering industry bodies.

Meanwhile, Alt News currently carries a message on its website, “We do not accept foreign remittance as we are not registered under the FCRA Act.”