Fugitive diamantaire Nirav Modi can be extradited to India, ruled a UK judge on Thursday. This brought to an end India’s effort to bring back the businessman, who fled from the country after being accused of defrauding the state-owned Punjab National Bank (PNB) of Rs 13,000 crore.
Also read: All about billionaire-turned-fugitive Nirav Modi, who will be extradited to India from UK
Nirav Modi’s business ventures
Born into a family that has traded in diamonds for generations, Modi founded Firestar (formerly known as Firestone) in 1999, which claimed to have more than $2 billion in sales, reported Forbes. He also founded a diamond company bearing his name. It had stores in Delhi, Mumbai, Hong Kong, London, Macau and New York.
A diamond billionaire, Modi featured in the Forbes list of Indian billionaires in 2013.
Nirav Modi’s long run from Indian agencies
Following the complaint by the PNB, which accused the diamantaire of defrauding the bank of thousands of crores of rupees, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) launched an investigation in February 2018.
However, Modi had already fled the country in January that year and later resurfaced in the United Kingdom.
He was arrested in the UK in March 2019 and was lodged at Wandsworth Prison in south-west London.
Modi is charged with two sets of criminal proceedings, one undertaken by the CBI and the other by the Enforcement Directorate (ED).
The CBI is probing the large-scale fraud upon PNB through the fraudulent obtaining of letters of undertaking (LoUs) and the ED case is related to the laundering of the proceeds of that fraud.
Also read: Nirav Modi’s extradition case: Here are the charges against him
Modi also faces two additional charges of “causing the disappearance of evidence” and intimidating witnesses or %u201Ccriminal intimidation to cause death%u201D, which were added to the CBI case.
