Chinese movie star Fan Bingbing and her companies have been ordered to pay a total of about 880 million yuan ($128 million) in back taxes and fines for having evaded about 140 million yuan in taxes, Chinese state media said Wednesday.

(Fan Bingbing at the Cannes Film Festival in May) [Getty/Kyodo]

Fan, one of China's highest paid and most popular actresses, had not been seen in public since she last updated her blog in June, spurring speculation about the whereabouts of the X-Men star amid rumors she had been implicated in massive tax evasion.

The State Taxation Administration and the Jiangsu Provincial Tax Service said they started investigating Fan in early June after receiving information from members of the public that accused her of tax evasion through fraudulent contracts, Xinhua News Agency said.

Fan will be free of criminal liability if she pays back the taxes and fines before an undisclosed deadline, the report said.

The actress must pay a fine of 240 million yuan for concealing real income through contract fraud and another fine of 239 million yuan for using the accounts of her studio to hide personal income.

Fan's agent, identified by the surname Mou, was found to have "obstructed the law enforcement process by making employees hide and deliberately destroy accounting materials of the companies involved," the report said.

Mou and a few other individuals are in police custody for further investigation.

The authorities also demanded that all workers in the film and television industries pay unpaid taxes before Dec. 31 to avoid "administrative punishment and penalties," the report said.

In a letter posted on her Weibo account, China's equivalent of Twitter, Fan admitted Wednesday to evading tax from earnings from the Chinese movie "Unbreakable Spirit" with fraudulent contracts and apologized for her "loose self-control in front of economic gain."

The movie, also starring Bruce Willis, is a war-drama about Japanese bombings of Chinese city of Chongqing during World War II, scheduled to be released in late October.

"I will pay the back taxes and penalties as imposed by the taxation authorities," Fan said in the letter.

"I have disappointed the country that raised me, disappointed the society that trusted me and fans who loved me. Allow me to sincerely apologize again. Please forgive me!"