The United Kingdom Home Department on Friday approved the extradition of fugitive diamantaire Nirav Modi, PTI reported. On February 25, the Westminster Magistrate’s Court had ruled that Modi can be extradited to India to face trial. The court’s findings were sent to the Home Department, which cleared the extradition.

The 49-year-old diamond merchant is charged with defrauding the state-owned Punjab National Bank (PNB) of Rs 13,000 crore. He fled from India and was reported of being in the UK in July 2018.

Having being born in a family which had traded in diamonds for years, Modi founded Firestar (formerly known as Firestone) in 1999, which claimed to have more than $2 billion in sales, reported Forbes. He later founded a diamond business bearing his name, which had stores in Delhi, Mumbai, Hong Kong, London, Macau and New York.

In 2013, he featured on the Forbes list of Indian billionaires.

The Central Bureau of Investigation in 2018 launched an investigation against Modi on the complaint of PNB, which accused the diamantaire of defrauding the government-owned bank of thousands of crores of rupees.

He fled from India in 2018 and was later reported to be in the UK. 

Also read: Nirav Modi’s sister, brother-in-law turn approver in PNB money laundering case

He was arrested in March 2019 and was lodged at Wandsworth Prison in south-west London. India was seeking his extradition from the UK.

Modi is charged with two sets of criminal proceedings. The CBI is investigating the large-scale fraud upon PNB through the fraudulent obtaining of letters of undertaking (LoUs) and the Enforcement Directorate (ED) case is related to the laundering of the proceeds of that fraud.

He also faces charges of “causing the disappearance of evidence” and intimidating witnesses or “criminal intimidation to cause death”, which were added to the CBI case.