Panama Papers: ED questions actor Aishwarya Rai Bachchan for over 5 hours

New Delhi, December 20

The Enforcement Directorate questioned actor Aishwarya Rai Bachchan for over five hours on Monday in connection with the 2016 ‘Panama Papers’ global tax leaks case. 

Reports said the 48-year-old daughter-in-law of veteran actor Amitabh Bachchan was being questioned and her statement was recorded under the provisions of the Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA).

The actor also submitted some documents to the agency when she appeared before the agency at its office near India Gate.

Dubbed ‘Panama Papers’, an investigation of a stockpile of records from Panamanian legal firm Mossack Fonseca by the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) in 2016 had named several world leaders and celebrities who allegedly stashed away money abroad in offshore companies.

Some of them are stated to be holding valid overseas accounts.

The leaks tranche had a total of 426 India-linked cases.

The ED has been probing the case linked to the Bachchans since 2016-17.

It had issued notices to the Bachchan family asking them to explain their foreign remittances since 2004 under the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) Liberalised Remittance Scheme (LRS) and regulated under the FEMA.

Some documents were submitted by the Bachchans to the agency then.

Some other instances of alleged irregularities linked to the family are also under the scanner of the federal probe agency, sources said.

Aishwarya, married to Amitabh Bachchan’s actor son Abhishek, was stated by the ICIJ to have links with an offshore entity in the British Virgin Islands (BVI) that was created in 2005.

Her family was also stated to be part of this offshore entity that had an “initial authorised capital of USD 50,000”. The company was reportedly dissolved in 2008.

Abhishek Bachchan has also been examined by the ED in the past in another instance linked to the offshore leaks case, sources said.

The government had created a multi-agency group (MAG) of central investigative agencies under the chairman of the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) that also comprised officials from the ED, RBI and the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) to monitor probe into the Panama Papers and similar global tax leaks cases.

It had recently said that “total undisclosed credits of Rs 20,353 crore” had been detected with respect to 930 India-linked entities in the Panama and Paradise Paper Leaks, as on October 1, 2021. — Agencies