Five-time Grand Slam champion Maria Sharapova is under investigation in India for cheating and criminal conspiracy after the collapse of a luxury housing project that she endorsed, police and a lawyer said yesterday.
The firm behind the development is alleged to have taken millions of rupees from homebuyers before the project folded.
“We have registered a case of cheating on directions from the court,” police officer Arvind Sharma said.
He said Sharapova and the firm behind the development, Homestead Infrastructure Development, were named in the case.
The 30-year-old tennis star travelled to India in 2012 to launch the luxury high-rise apartment complex – later named Ballet by Sharapova – which prospective buyers were told would house a tennis academy, a clubhouse and a helipad.
The website of the project quotes Sharapova as saying her goal was to “make the owners feel like they own something special and different”.
“Any celebrity who endorses any product technically becomes an agent for that company. No one would have invested in the project if Sharapova’s name was not there,” said Piyush Singh, a lawyer representing the complainant Bhawana Agarwal.
The project in Gurugram, a satellite city of New Delhi, was supposed to be ready in 2016 but Singh said construction work was abandoned after builders collected millions from homebuyers.
The court said: “If the complainant is to be believed, it shows that nothing has happened on the said project and the alleged persons have no licence or sanction for construction or development at the project, for which the complainant paid Rs53.03 lakh.”
“If the alleged persons have no licence or sanction to raise the residential flats and accepted Rs53 lakh to book a flat of unit area of 2,500 sq ft, then they have undoubtedly committed criminal offence,” the court said.
Calls to the developers went unanswered.
Sharapova has not yet commented on the case.