Tennis player Maria Sharapova is under investigation for an alleged housing fraud in India.
Indian police are investigating a 'cheating and criminal conspiracy' case involving a real estate company that used the tennis star to endorse a luxury housing project that never took off, AP reports.
Real estate firm Homestead Infrastructure is accused of taking millions of rupees from home buyers for a project named ‘Ballet by Maria Sharapova,' a luxury apartment complex with its own helipad, tennis academy and other amenities.
The five-time Grand Slam champion had travelled to India in 2013 to launch this project. The project in Gurgaon was supposed to be ready in 2016 but construction work was abandoned
One of the buyers Bhawana Agarwal claims to have paid Homestead Infrastructure 5.4 million rupees.
Her lawyer, Piyush Singh was quoted as saying that Sharapova's celebrity was the reason most people put their money into the project.
Agarwal followed up with the builders for the next three years but they stopped taking her calls, Singh said.
"The project never saw the light of day," Singh said.
Singh said including the celebrity who endorsed the project in the complaint against the builder was testing relatively new legal ground -- that celebrities too have a responsibility "to do some due diligence" on the project before lending their name and credibility to it.
"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," the lawyer told The Times of India.
On Wednesday, several calls to the numbers of the building company's website went unanswered, AP wrote.
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