India looking at bringing back Choksi under Antiguan law applicable to Commonwealth countries
The Enforcement Directorate, which continued its searches against Modi, Choksi and their companies for the fourth day on Sunday , is also moving to attach at least two dozen immovable properties under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act.
The Singapore high court has put a freeze on deposits of $ 6.122 million following Enforcement Directorate's request on the ground that the money was "proceeds of crime" illegally siphoned off by Nirav Modi from the Punjab National Bank.
The move takes the process of extraditing and bringing back Nirav Modi to face the law in India to the next stage, the sources said.
The 12,000-page charge sheet further claimed that a similar fraud was detected in 2016 following which the RBI took up the issue and issued circulars to all banks.
The latest fraud is a failure of management supervision and accountability, as no bad debt was generated and no cash was involved
FinMin finally sacked executive directors K V Brahmaji Rao and Sanjiv Sharan on January 18. The bank's board, however, had felt they had no criminal intent and it was a case of 'casual oversight'
The agency on Friday also carried out searches on the premises of the Gitanjali Group at 20 places in Mumbai, Pune, Surat, Jaipur, Hyderabad and Coimbatore.
The agency on Monday questioned three general managers of the Punjab National Bank who have handled the -International Banking Division and Treasury department of the bank, officials said without revealing their identity.
A large number of public sector bank employees, as a matter of routine, do not "take" promotions so that they are not transferred out of their hometowns. The eastern region is famous for this, but it is a common practice everywhere, says Shyamal Majumdar.
Fugitive diamantaire Nirav Modi's sister and brother-in-law have "turned approvers" in the over $2 billion PNB fraud case against him and they will help the Enforcement Directorate confiscate assets worth Rs 579 crore, including Swiss bank deposits, the agency said on Thursday. Forty-nine-year-old Nirav Modi, who is currently lodged in a London jail, his uncle Mehul Choksi and others are being probed by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) in the Punjab National Bank (PNB) money laundering case since 2018. The diamond merchant's younger sister Purvi Modi (47) is a Belgian national while her husband Maiank Mehta is a British citizen. They are stated to be based abroad and have never joined the probe.
The problem here is that internal auditors are good at accounts, but they are not trained to track foreign exchange transactions
The jewellers and companies linked to Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi had allegedly colluded with PNB officers to obtain fake bank guarantees to get loan from overseas branches of Indian banks including Allahabad Bank, Axis Bank and UCO Bank.
According to ED sources Sunil Mehta said the fraud took place due to "systemic failure" and "procedural lapses", owing to lack of interface or proper links between the core banking software and the SWIFT interbank messaging system.
The billionaire jeweller, who has fled the country, in the letter also disagreed with the loan default amount of Rs 11,400 crore and pegged the amount his companies owe to the bank at under Rs 5,000 crore.
'I was shocked by the kidnapping episode. I could have lost my life.'
The Rs 11,400 crore PNB fraud saga unfolded after a bribery complaint by the Hong Kong branch of an Indian bank.
The king and his wife, Camilla, the queen consort, travelled from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Abbey -- a distance of 2.2-km -- at a stately pace in the Diamond Jubilee State Coach bearing a gilded crown, which was commissioned for Queen Elizabeth II in 2012.
Theoretically, Modi, who understood corporate finance, committed no crime by raising debt to fund a growing business. In fact, he did a tidy job of it, but his operation started to see the ground underneath it give way in January 2018. A fascinating excerpt from Pavan C Lall's Flawed: The Rise And Fall Of India's Diamond Mogul Nirav Modi.
The Income Tax Department on Tuesday also raided 20 premises linked to Gitanjali Gems promoter Mehul Choksi and suspected shell firms in connection with an alleged tax evasion case against them, official sources said.
The question being silently telegraphed around the court room was: When did this happen? Wasn't this trial about Indrani murdering her daughter to prevent her from marrying Rahul Mukerjea, her husband Peter Mukerjea's son from his first marriage?
