Fan Bingbing whistle-blower back on the attack with jab at ‘huge fraud’ Air Strike
Former CCTV talk show host Cui Yongyuan fans the tax evasion flames after top-paid actress fined US$129 million for under-reporting income
The celebrity whistle-blower who first accused top Chinese actress Fan Bingbing of tax evasion has claimed her latest film is a “huge fraud”, just hours after it was revealed that Fan has to pay hundreds of millions of yuan in fines.
“The facts prove once again that Air Strike is a huge fraud, and one person who took part in the huge fraud has now been punished,” former CCTV talk show host Cui Yongyuan wrote on his official microblog on Wednesday.
Fan, 37, has been ordered to pay fines of nearly 884 million yuan (US$129 million) for evading tax through fraudulent contracts, according state news agency Xinhua.
It was unclear if Cui was making fresh claims of evasion – an official investigation found that Fan evaded 20 million yuan of taxable income by under-reporting her pay for the movie as 10 million yuan, The Beijing News reported.
Air Strike, produced by Mel Gibson and known as Unbreakable Spirit in China, is set in Chongqing during the second world war and scheduled for worldwide release later this month.
According to the report, the actress evaded the tax through a system of “yin-yang” contracts, a practice that made headlines in May when Cui posted photos of two contracts Fan signed for the film Cell Phone 2, by acclaimed Chinese director Feng Xiaogang.