Times Group head offices were opened yesterday following a stay order the group obtained on Friday last week against Malawi Revenue Authority (MRA), which sealed the offices on Friday over an old tax dispute.<\/p>\n
Times Group lawyer, Innocent Kalua, said he managed to serve the tax collectors with the injunction yesterday morning as, over the weekend, officials from the authority were playing \u201chard to get\u201d to be served with the injunction.<\/p>\n
\u201cYes, the offices have been opened; we managed to serve MRA early this morning [Monday]. This means we will be operating normally,\u201d Kalua said.<\/p>\n
He said the two sides would meet in court on Thursday for hearing on whether to sustain the stay order or have it vacated.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou might be aware that there is another case on the same. So, that is the main case which is on judicial review stage and is coming in court on Friday. We argued that the decision by MRA to have their money in 21 days was unreasonable. They wrote us again demanding the same money in seven days, which is unreasonable too considering circumstances we are going through. We cannot even pay that K700 million in a year,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The closure of the Times Group complex in Blantyre on Friday affected television and radio station operations while the print section had to work from other premises. The tax authority also seized vehicles belonging to the company.<\/p>\n
In December last year, MRA also sealed Times Group but the company re-opened and resumed its operations within 24 hours.<\/p>\n
The closures are believed to be politically motivated because Times Group is known for its fearless and fierce uncovering of wrongdoing in the government.<\/p>\n
Times Group is Malawi\u2019s leading media institution and publishes The Daily Times, Malawi News <\/em>and The Sunday Times<\/em>. It also owns Times Radio as well as three-time Media Institute of Southern Africa- Malawi Chapter Television Station of the Year winner, Times Television.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Times Group head offices were opened yesterday following a stay order the group obtained on Friday last week against Malawi Revenue Authority (MRA), which sealed the offices on Friday over an old tax dispute. Times Group lawyer, Innocent Kalua, said he managed to serve the tax collectors with the injunction yesterday morning as, over the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":66342,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-66340","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66340","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66340"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66340\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":66343,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66340\/revisions\/66343"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66342"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}