Five-time Grand Slam champion Maria Sharapova is being investigated by police in New Delhi, India, in a cheating and criminal conspiracy case involving a real estate company using the tennis star to endorse a luxury housing project that never took off. Real estate firm Homestead Infrastructure is accused of taking tens of millions of dollars from home buyers for a project named “Ballet by Maria Sharapova,” a luxury apartment complex with its own helipad, tennis academy and other amenities. She traveled to India in 2013 to launch the project at a glitzy ceremony. Police began the investigation Nov. 16. Piyush Singh, a lawyer representing one of the home buyers, said Wednesday that Sharapova’s celebrity was the reason most people put their money into the project. Singh said his client, Bhawana Agarwal, paid Homestead Infrastructure $81,678 in 2013 because she was impressed by Sharapova’s association with the project in Gurgaon, a suburb of the Indian capital. The cost of an apartment in the swanky project was $308,000. Agarwal then spent the next three years chasing the builders for updates on the property and her investment in it but they stopped taking her calls, Singh said. On Wednesday, several calls to the numbers of the building company’s website went unanswered. “The project never saw the light of day,” Singh said. Singh said the police investigation based on his client’s complaint was testing relatively new legal ground — that celebrities endorsing projects that draw vast sums of money from investors had a responsibility “to do some due diligence” on the project before lending their name and credibility to it. Sharapova isn’t the only international sports celebrity that the real estate firm roped in. Its website also advertises a project with Formula One great Michael Schumacher called the Michael Schumacher World Tower.
• President Donald Trump started off his first day of Thanksgiving vacation Wednesday by resuming his taunts of the father of a UCLA basketball player detained for shoplifting in China, calling him an “ungrateful fool.” In a series of tweets fired off before dawn, the president complained again LaVar Ball, father of LiAngelo Ball, hasn’t given him credit for the release of his son and two other UCLA basketball players after they were accused of shoplifting while in China for a basketball game. Tweeting from his Florida vacation home, Trump said: “It wasn’t the White House, it wasn’t the State Department, it wasn’t father LaVar’s so-called people on the ground in China that got his son out of a long term prison sentence - IT WAS ME.” “Too bad! LaVar is just a poor man’s version of Don King, but without the hair,” he said, referencing the flamboyant boxing promoter whom Trump once saluted as “a phenomenal person” despite a conviction for manslaughter. Trump also warned Ball “could have spent the next 5 to 10 years during Thanksgiving with your son in China, but no NBA contract to support you” had it not been for his intervention. “But remember LaVar, shoplifting is NOT a little thing. It’s a really big deal, especially in China,” he wrote. LiAngelo Ball and two UCLA teammates were released after a brief detention in China while Trump was visiting the country. Trump has taken credit for the release, saying he discussed the situation with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing. Trump had said he should have left all three players in jail because LaVar Ball hadn’t thanked him publicly for his intervention. LaVar Ball, whose eldest son, Lonzo, plays for the Los Angeles Lakers, has repeatedly minimized Trump’s involvement in winning the players’ release, telling CNN earlier this week: “If I feel nobody did anything, I don’t have to go around saying thank you to everybody.” All three players have been suspended from the team.