Prabir Purkayastha, the founder and Editor-in-Chief of online news portal NewsClick, was served a penalty notice worth Rs 184 crore by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Monday under the Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA).
According to the Enforcement Directorate order, PPK NEWSCLICK Studio Private Limited (the company that owns NewsClick) was fined Rs 120 crore, while Purkayastha got a Rs 64 crore penalty.
He and the company were found to be "contravening" FEMA provisions on two counts—misrepresentation of FDI funds and misdeclaration of services and exports, a PTI report said.
Notably, he was arrested on October 3, 2023 under a different case—after prolonged raids on multiple locations linked to the news portal over allegations that it received money to publish pro-China propaganda.
Specifically, the FIR claimed that the funds were given to NewsClick to "disrupt the sovereignty of India" and cause disaffection against the country. It also claimed that Purkayastha had conspired with the People's Alliance for Democracy and Secularism (PADS) to sabotage the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.
Amit Chakravarty, the HR head of the news portal, was also arrested under the anti-terror legislation, the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, or UAPA, while many journalists were questioned.
However, this is not the first time that the journalist Purkayastha—who is also reportedly an activist in the literacy and free software movements, as well as an expert on the power and telecom sectors—was arrested.
According to The Hindu, he was first imprisoned during the Emergency in 1975, under the Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA), decades before his 2023 arrest.
Born in 1949, the journalist once trained as an engineer in the universities of Calcutta and Allahabad, after which he joined the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi as a research scholar under the School of Computers and System Sciences in 1975.
It was during his time in JNU, specifically during a protest, that he was arrested by plainclothes policemen. However, he was later released as he was mistaken for D.P. Tripathi.
As for the aftermath of the 2023 arrest, he was released by the Supreme Court in May 2024, calling the UAPA case against Purkayastha "invalid in the eyes of the law".