Bennett Coleman & Company has issued a legal notice to BARC on account of the 'shocking illegal and fraudulent viewership management and tampering of television audience measurement and television rating points'.
According to the statement issued by Times Now, the legal notice follows the press conference held on 25 December by the Joint Commissioner of Mumbai Police during which he spoke about the forensic audit report of July 2020 which revealed that the TRPs of various channels were manipulated, rigged, tampered and at times pre-decided by the erstwhile upper echelon of BARC.
According to the Joint Commissioner of Mumbai Police, Times Now had been reduced to the second position in a fraudulent/illegal manner with a view to make another newly launched English news channel (Republic TV) as the number one channel. The statement added that the press conference made it clear that activities resulting in viewership malpractices and TRP manipulation were undertaken by BARC with a malafide intention to biasedly cause wrongful losses to some of its subscribers whilst other co-conspiring subscribers benefitted of the malicious acts.
Times Now believes that the manipulation and fudging of the TRP data has negatively affected advertising revenues worth Rs 431 crores. In addition to the above, Times Now believes it has suffered significant loss of reputation, goodwill, brand value and loss of future profits which it is in the process of calculating. The channel also believes it is entitled to the refund of the entire license fee paid to BARC - amounting to Rs. 21.83 crores along with interest thereon at the rate of 18% p.a. for the reason that no truthful viewership data was provided by BARC.
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