- Thursday, April 25, 2024
By: Radhakrishna N S
INDIAN businessman Nirav Modi has been further remanded in custody by a British court until May 24.
Modi, 48, is wanted in India for legal proceedings over his alleged involvement in a $2 billion fraud at India’s state-run Punjab National Bank (PNB).
Modi appeared before Westminster Magistrates’ Court Chief Magistrate Emma Arbuthnot via video conference from prison.
After a very brief hearing the judge further remanded the jeweller till May 24.
The judge has scheduled a full hearing on May 30.
The celebrity jeweller is in Wandsworth prison in south-west London after his arrest last month on the grounds that there was a “substantial risk the accused would fail to surrender”.
Modi was arrested by the Scotland Yard officers on March 19.
PNB officials and government investigators have said that a lone middle-aged manager, later aided by a young subordinate, engineered fraudulent transactions totalling about $1.8bn from 2011 to 2017.
PNB, India’s second-largest state-run lender, said in 2018 that two jewellery groups headed by Modi and his uncle Mehul Choksi had defrauded it by raising credit from other Indian banks using fraudulent guarantees issued by the PNB rogue staff.
Choksi has also denied wrongdoing.
Modi and his family left India in January 2018, Indian officials have said, before the fraud came to light.
