India said today it will investigate allegations that more than 500 Indians including Bollywood actors, industrialists and politicians used a Panama-based law firm to hide their money using offshore tax havens.
On Sunday, a massive leak of 11.5 million documents from Mossack Fonseca, one of the world's biggest and most secretive offshore law firms, implicated political leaders, executives and criminals around the world in hiding their money using offshore tax havens.
The documents, dubbed the Panama Papers, were obtained by Sueddeutsche Zeitung , a daily newspaper headquartered in Munich. The German paper then shared the documents with the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and other media organisations.
The Indian Express daily, which said it participated in an eight-month investigation of the documents beginning in July 2015, reported names of 500 Indians, including superstars Aishwarya Rai Bachchan ( photo ) and her father-in-law, Bollywood icon Amitabh Bachchan, in the leak.
"Unlawful financial holdings abroad will face action," Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said in Delhi.
"On the prime minister's advice, we have constituted a multi-agency group to monitor all the information and to collect further information in this regard," he said.
The panel comprises the Central Board of Direct Taxes and representatives of the Reserve Bank of India.
Jaitley earlier said Indians who did who did not utilise a government scheme to reveal their illegal assets stashed abroad will find such "adventurism extremely costly".
The government is under pressure to reveal and recover black or untaxed money, among the key poll promises made by Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his election campaign in 2014.
Indian media reports said that Rai, a former Miss World and top Indian actress, had rejected documents as "totally untrue and false".
Jaitley, meanwhile, welcomed the expose.
"It appears in the next few days more names are going to come out," the finance minister said.
"I have been repeatedly saying that the world is going to become increasingly more transparent," Jaitley said.
"Countries are cooperating with each other and slowly all this information is going to come out as a result of various global initiatives which have been launched."
- dpa
