India has renewed its crackdown on Chinese mobile apps, with the Bombay High Court yesterday rejecting a petition by Jitterbug parent company Beijing ByteDance to unfreeze its local bank account and requiring ByteDance to first deposit the amount of tax evasion involved.
The Times of India reported today that a full court of the Bombay High Court heard the Indian government-appointed lawyer’s statement yesterday that ByteDance Technology Co. owed the government about 790 million rupees (NT$306 million) in taxes, and that tax authorities had frozen ByteDance’s account.
After hearing the statements of the two companies, the Full Bench of the Bombay High Court ordered that ByteDance must first deposit Rs. 790 million or more in a public bank in India to protect the government’s taxing rights.
The Full Bench of the Bombay High Court noted that the account could be unfrozen only after BytePower deposited Rs. 790 million into a public bank in India.
India’s central government tax authorities investigated certain financial transactions of Beijing ByteDance in India in mid-March and ordered HSBC and Citibank in Mumbai to freeze ByteDance’s accounts in the country, arguing that ByteDance was suspected of tax evasion.
ByteDance objected to the Indian authorities’ action to freeze the company’s accounts in India, and on March 25 filed a 209-page document with the Bombay High Court through appointed lawyers against the authorities for freezing ByteDance’s accounts in India without evidence and without prior notice to ByteDance as required by Indian law, and for taking any “drastic action”.
The legal documents filed by Bytespring allege that Indian tax authorities “froze Bytespring’s accounts to exert undue coercion” during the investigation.
The report cited two unnamed people with knowledge of the matter as saying that employees at ByteChip India were not paid in March after their accounts in India were frozen.
Lawyers appointed by Bytespring told the Bombay High Court panel that Bytespring employs 1,335 people in India, not including outsourced staff, and appealed to the panel to lift the freeze immediately so that they could receive their salaries.
After the confrontation and conflict between Indian and Chinese communist forces in eastern Ladakh since early May last year, the Indian government has announced several waves of App bans on the grounds of national security and protection of personal privacy of its citizens.
Action application analysis company Sensor Tower data show that Jitterbit had 112 million downloads in the world last May, of which 20% came from India, double the U.S. market; after Jitterbit was banned by the Indian government in India, it is estimated that byte jumping in India lost more than $6 billion, byte jumping and layoffs in January this year.
Recent Comments