The Criminal Intelligence Unit (CIU) of the Criminal Branch of the Mumbai Police on Tuesday named seven other people, including Arnab Goswami, editor-in-chief of Republic TV and Republic Bharat news channels, as accused in the second act of additional charge of 1,912 pages. in the case of manipulation of the television evaluation point (TRP).
Of the seven new accused, five are linked to the Republic TV group. Shiva Subramanyam, Priya Mukherji, Shivendra Muldhekar and Ranjit Waltkar are the other four besides Goswami. The other two are linked to the Maha Movie channel. A total of 22 people are now charged in this case.
Everything you need to know about the case:
A complaint was registered at the Kandivli police station on October 6 last year based on the complaint filed by representatives of Hansa Research Group, an entrepreneur employed by the Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC), a joint company industry created to manage television audience measurement. systems.
The complaint was filed against some of their relationship managers for allegedly manipulating television ratings and helping certain channels to artificially increase their ratings. The complainant accused certain television stations of having rigged TRP via some of their relations officers.
According to police, Times Now’s ratings were reduced and Republic’s ratings were artificially increased by the accused, resulting in a loss of 432 crore to Times Now. Additional evidence was presented against Goswami and other defendants in the second supplemental indictment, police said.
Police said some of the homes equipped with BARC bar-o-meters to measure TRP were bribed by Republic TV and other Hansa research group relations officials, who were in direct contact with the homes.
The first indictment against the 12 defendants was filed on November 24, 2020, after the case was transferred to SDI and the first additional indictment against three other defendants on January 11 of this year.
CIU officers said the investigation uncovered three modes of manipulation of TRPs: inducing panel houses with Barc-o-Meters, paying money to watch certain TV channels for a specified length of time, double LCN.
A complaint has already been made against representatives of all channels involved in the manipulation of the TRP – Box Cinema, Fast Marathi, Mahamovie, Republic TV and Republic Bharat, police said.
Police recovered a lengthy WhatsApp conversation between Goswami, who is accused No.19 in the case, and former BARC CEO Partho Dasgupta during the investigation. Gupta and Goswami were in constant contact for the benefit of the news channel and the former CEO of BARC even shared confidential information with Goswami.
The criminal branch claimed that during the investigation, Goswami responded to a list of questions that was mailed to him and allegedly agreed that the retrieved talks were his conversation with the former CEO of BARC.
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