Questions hang over blacklisted Fan Bingbing’s projects
BEIJING: Questions hang over actress Fan Bingbing’s projects after her disapperance in the wake of investigations into her alleged attempts at evading taxes/
Since her disappearance last July, a number of reports have indicated that she is either in prison or under house arrest.
Officially, Beijing has banned her from showbiz for three years.
Questions that hang over her fate are beginning to cast a cloud over the projects she is involved in, including high-profile allfemale action movie 355 and the luxury brands that had been competing to hire her as a spokeswoman.
355 produced by Jessica Chastain, was the top- selling project at Cannes this year. Sources close to the production tell Variety that there is no need to rethink yet as the movie is not scheduled to shoot until mid2019. But whether 355 can go ahead without Fan is unclear. She is not an investor, but the exit of the film’s major Chinese star could lead to the loss of the film’s US$ 20 million pre- sale to Huayi Bros.
Fan has also been the public face of such brands as Montblanc, Louis Vuitton, De Beers, and fashion house Guerlain. So far, only Montblanc is reported to have severed its connections with Fan, but she has been conspicuously absent from the other campaigns. Guilt by association is particularly worrisome in China, where government displeasure can quickly doom a person’s or a company’s prospects.
Fan appears to have drawn greater official scrutiny after leaked documents seemed to show that she made use of “yinyang” contracts, in which double contracts are issued for the same work, but only the lowervalue one is declared to tax authorities. Fan has denied the allegations, but she has not been seen in public since a July 1 visit to a children’s hospital, and her social media accounts have been silent.
China’s tax administration has ordered an investigation into the use of yin-yang contracts. The Communist government has a history of taking down prominent public figures as a warning to other high fliers and the general public. In 2002, actress Liu Xiaoqing was jailed for a year for tax evasion.
As for which government agency might be investigating and even detaining Fan, speculation has ranged widely. Besides tax authorities, the State Administration of Foreign Exchange could be interested in her. Other wealthy celebrities in recent years have been accused of foreign- exchange violations as they moved some of their money abroad.
Or Fan could have been forced out of sight by the State Administration of Press Publishing Radio Film and Television, which oversees the entertainment industry, in an escalation of its crackdown on celebrity misconduct. Earlier this year, the agency was brought under the direct control of the Communist Party’s Propaganda Department.
Other possibilities are authorities in Jiangsu province, home to Wuxi Studios, and Xinjiang province, where Khorgos, a city not far from the border with Kazakhstan, has become the headquarters of several movie companies, on paper at least.
Both places offer significantly lower tax rates than the top rate of 45 per cent. Fan has an annual earning power of between US$ 30 million and US$ 40 million.