JOIN USPanama Papers case: ED quizzes Aishwarya Rai Bachchan for over 5 hours
Enforcement Directorate on Monday questioned Bollywood actress Aishwarya Rai Bachchan for around six hours in connection with a case linked to the 2016 'Panama Papers' global tax leaks case.
The ED recorded Aishwarya's statement under the Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA). The questioning came weeks after her husband Abhishek Bachchan was quizzed by the ED in another case arising out of the 'Panama Papers'.
Aishwarya, the 48-year-old daughter-in-law of superstar Amitabh Bachchan and actress-turned-Samajwadi Party MP Jaya Bachchan, left the ED office in Jam Nagar House around 7 PM after around six hours of questioning, officials said.
During her questioning, they said, the former Miss World was learnt to have submitted documents to the investigators with regard to the case.
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 leaked tranche had a total of 426 India-linked cases.
The ED has been probing the case linked to the Bachchans since 2016-17 and 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 Foreign Exchange Management Act (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, the sources said.
Aishwarya Rai Bachchan 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 $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, Reserve Bank of India (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" have been detected with respect to 930 India linked entities in the Panama and Paradise Paper Leaks, as of October 1, 2021.
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