Panama papers: ED may summon Amitabh Bachchan and family

The Enforcement Directorate has received replies from actor Amitabh Bachchan and his family members to notices issued to them in connection with its probe in the Panama Papers case and they could be summoned soon, officials said.
Officials in the anti-money laundering agency said they had issued notices to the Bachchan family some time back asking them to explain their foreign remittances since 2004 under the Liberalised Remittance Scheme (LRS) of the RBI.
They said the Enforcement Directorate has now received their replies to the notices issued under the Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA).
"The replies have been received. They could be soon summoned as part of the probe," sources said.
Amitabh Bachchan's name had cropped in the Panama Papers case which is also being probed by the Income Tax Department.
The taxman is probing Bollywood megastar's offshore remittances.
Dubbed as Panama Papers , an investigation of a stockpile of records from Panamanian legal firm Mossack Fonseca by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalist had named several world leaders and celebrities who had allegedly stashed away money abroad in offshore companies.
The documents had surfaced last year.

Hundreds are being probed by the Mumbai team of ED in the Panama Paper case, and some of the names include several Bollywood celebrities who were summoned under Section 37 of Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA).

Information from nearly 1.15 crore encrypted documents -- now being called the "Panama Papers" -- leaked from the files of the Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca, have revealed terabytes worth of information about thousands of companies and hundreds of persons who set up offshore companies to evade tax and launder money.

The information was first leaked to German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ)'s journalist over a year ago. The information was later handed over to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). The documents were then made available to about 100 media organisations, all members or ICIJ including The Indian Express. These media organisations sifted through the scores of documents, investigated the linkages, joined the dots and, eventually made the information public on April 4.

Panama Papers is now the largest international cooperation of its kind in the world. In the last one year, around 400 journalists from more than 100 media organisations in over 80 countries have taken part in researching the documents. Journalists from media organisations like Süddeutsche Zeitung, BBC, Guardian, Falter, The Indian Express, among others, have worked on the project. The leak is now touted as the biggest data leak to journalists.

Indian industrialists, Bollywood actors, politicians named in leaked Panama papers for tax evasion According to a report in The Indian Express, 500 Indians are on the list, from Bollywood actors Amitabh Bachchan and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, real-estate developer DLF's KP Singh, to politicians Anurag Kejriwal.

The documents contain data of over 214,000 offshore companies set up in the last forty years. However, ICIJ has maintained that many of these companies are likely to be for legitimate purposes also.