Necessary for us to comply with legal request: Razorpay CEO on Alt News data

Amid the controversy over sharing transaction data of fact-checking website Alt News with the Delhi Police, fintech platform Razorpay Co-founder and CEO Harshil Mathur said on Saturday that it was necessary for them to comply with the legal request.

Earlier this week, 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 the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act, 2010 investigation.

"We immediately reached out to the authorities to understand the scope and reasons for the request. A Razorpay senior leader went from Bengaluru to Delhi to speak to the authorities," Mathur said in a statement.

The platform temporarily disabled the business account awaiting clarity on the purpose of investigation.

"As soon as we got that clarity, we immediately re-enabled payments for them," he added.

"We would like to reassure our customers that the specific data we shared was only restricted to what was within the scope of investigation," said Mathur.


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".

Alt News had claimed that Razorpay shared its donor data with the Delhi Police without informing the portal, saying there was no preliminary investigation of any violation on its part.

The Supreme Court on Friday granted five days' interim bail to Alt News co-founder Mohammed Zubair in a Uttar Pradesh case but he will remain in custody in the Delhi case in keeping with a Delhi court's orders.


According to the FIR registered by the Delhi Police, he deliberately tweeted the objectionable content in 2018 to provoke breach of peace in the society.

"While I am not allowed to share the specifics owing to the ongoing investigation, I want to state that the concerned business was only enabled to receive domestic payments in-line with our policy to not allow International transactions without FCRA approval for donation pages," Mathur explained. - IANS