Officers arrived at the Reporter TV headquarters in Kalamassery in the early hours of Wednesday morning and, at almost the same time, at the residences of Anto Augustine in Kochi and Joskutty Augustine in Wayanad. The Augustine brothers run Reporter Broadcasting Company, the private firm that was supposed to bring Lionel Messi and the Argentina national team to Kerala.

The visit never materialised. It was billed as a friendly against Australia at Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium in Kochi on 17 November 2026, but the fixture was called off and Messi’s only Indian dates in the meantime were on a separate commercial tour that never touched Kerala.

A ₹126 crore payment nobody can trace

At the heart of the case is a single, disputed transfer. Reporter Broadcasting Company says it wired ₹126 crore to the Argentine Football Association through a US-based intermediary, Tour Prod Enter LLC, to secure the visit. Investigators say they have found no banking records confirming that any of it reached the AFA.

The state Special Investigation Team, formed by Kerala’s Home Department earlier this month and headed by Additional Director General P. Vijayan, has flagged ₹25.78 crore in alleged tax evasion by the company, most of it unpaid IGST on the foreign remittance to the AFA. The SIT has also asked the Enforcement Directorate to open a probe under the Foreign Exchange Management Act.

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The SIT’s wider report, quoted by Indian outlets, values the alleged fraud at ₹549.22 crore once undisclosed accounts, unrecorded borrowings and suppressed turnover are added to the picture.

Reporter TV: “an assault on press freedom”

Wednesday’s raid quickly became a political fight. Reporter TV said police walked into a live broadcast and confiscated the phones of staff on shift; officers pushed back, saying they had only asked employees to set their phones aside.

Former Kerala chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan, whose government was in charge when the deal was signed, was blunter.

“Keralam will not tolerate this act of aggression aimed at silencing the media,” he said, calling the operation “a despicable assault on press freedom.”

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Current chief minister V. D. Satheesan, whose government set up the SIT earlier this month, has framed the raids as part of a legitimate financial investigation rather than a move against a broadcaster.

Messi is not accused of anything

The footballer himself has no role in the case. Messi is not named as an accused, not a witness, and no source suggests he or his representatives were aware of how his image was being used in Kerala. Argentina’s federation is a party to the story only because it is the counterpart that was allegedly paid, and, on investigators’ current findings, never received the money.

What the SIT is trying to establish is how a private company with only ₹10 lakh of paid-up capital ended up as the sole commercial partner of a project that promised one of the biggest names in world sport, and where the money that changed hands actually went.

The next test lies with the Enforcement Directorate, which has been asked to pursue the ₹126 crore transfer as a possible foreign-exchange violation.

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