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The leaked documents are back making headlines after the agency summoned Bollywood actress and former Miss World, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, to join the probe in a matter linked to the 2016 Panama Papers case.
The actress is facing money-laundering allegations for her involvement in an offshore entity.
The ‘Devdas’ star’s husband Abhishek Bachchan and father-in-law Amitabh Bachchan are already facing investigations in separate cases under the Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA) and the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) being probed by the ED.
What Are The Panama Papers?
The documents that were published in 2016 are 11.5 million leaked financial and attorney-client details of over 214,488 offshore entities which were created by Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca in order to evade taxes and other money fraud.
The leaked documents contain financial information of public officials, corporate honchos, celebrities, politicians and more that were previously kept private.
This data was released by a German newspaper ‘Suddeutsche Zeitung’ under the title of ‘Panama Papers’ on 3rd April 2016 in which celebrities, businessmen and famous personalities of dozens of countries including India were named.
The Panama Papers disclosed data from the years between 1977 and 2015 and shook the entire world with the shocking revelation.
500 Indians In The Club
It had around 500 Indian names including several Bollywood personalities such as Amitabh Bachchan, his daughter-in-law Aishwarya Rai, actor Ajay Devgn, businessman Vijay Mallya, former Solicitor General of India, Harish Salve, along with the most wanted underworld figure Iqbal Mirchi, who was allegedly Dawood Ibrahim’s right-hand man.
The Panama Papers exposed alleged illegal properties worth around Rs 20,078 crore of 500 Indians who were named in the documents.
Bollywood actor Ajay Devgn
After the papers were published in 2016, the authorities came to know about the tax evasion by the accused and their alleged illegal entities.
John Doe, The Whistleblower
The documents were leaked to a journalist working for the German newspaper by a person using the pseudonym John Doe. Till date, the whistleblower remains anonymous, even to the journalists who worked on the investigation.
The anonymous whistleblower, told German journalist Bastian Obermayer that his “life was in danger” and cited income inequality as the reason for leaking the documents.
The data was leaked “simply because I understood enough about their contents to realize the scale of the injustices they described,” Doe told the journalist.
After the German publication broke the news, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) posted the full document on its website later.
Several countries initiated their separate investigations in the matter after the papers were leaked and named many big personalities from across the world.
The Indian government created a multi-agency group (MAG) combining central investigative agencies under the chairman of the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) that includes officials from the ED, Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) to monitor a probe into the Panama Papers and similar global tax leaks cases.
It had recently said that as on October 1, 2021, “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.
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