Aishwarya Rai Bachchan questioned for nearly 6 hours in Panama Papers case

Aishwarya Rai Bachchan for nearly 6 hours in a case linked to the 2016 'Panama Papers global tax leaks.

Aishwarya Rai Bachchan for nearly 6 hours in a case linked to the 2016 'Panama Papers global tax leaks

Enforcement Directorate (ED) officials on Monday (December 20) questioned actress Aishwarya Rai Bachchan for nearly six hours in a case linked to the 2016 'Panama Papers global tax leaks. The actress, spotted leaving the ED's New Delhi office after nearly six hours, offered no comments to media.  Aishwarya Rai Bachchan's statement was recorded under the provisions of the Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA).

The actress' name had appeared in the 2016 'Panama Papers' scandal - an investigation of a stockpile of records from Panamanian legal firm Mossack Fonseca, done by the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ).

Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, 48, the daughter-in-law of Bollywood star Amitabh Bachchan, was stated by the ICIJ to have links with an offshore entity in the British Virgin Islands (BVI) that was created in 2005.

Aishwarya Rai Bachchan's quizzing comes weeks after her husband Abhishek Bachchan was also questioned by the agency in another case emerging from the same set of papers linked to the offshore leaks case, some official sources told news agency PTI.

The former Miss World left the agency's office located in Jam Nagar house here shortly after 7 PM.

The actor was ushered into a white car from the back door of the ED office even as a huge posse of media personnel tried in vain to get her comment.

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 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.