NBW against Nirav Modi, Mehul Choksi.
A special court issued today non-bailable warrants (NBWs) against diamond traders Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi in the alleged Rs 12,700 crore Punjab National Bank scam.
The court, set up under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), issued the NBWs on applications filed by the Enforcement Directorate (ED), one of the agencies probing the bank fraud cases registered last month. The ED had earlier issued summonses to Modi and Choksi, both key accused in the scam cases, asking them to appear before the central agency.
However, the two diamond traders, who are said to have left the country before criminal cases were registered, had failed to appear before the ED, promoting the agency to move the PMLA court for issuance of NBWs against them. On February 27, the ED had moved the court seeking an NBW against Modi. The agency had told the court that it had issued three summonses to Modi to appear before it.
"We issued three summonses to Choksi. He neither responded to those summonses nor appeared before the agency," special ED prosecutor Hiten Venegaonkar had told the special court presided over by Judge M S Azmi here on March 1.
A special Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) court on Saturday sent six accused, arrested in connection with the Punjab National Bank (PNB) fraud case including Gokulnath Shetty, to 14 days judicial custody. Shetty, the retired deputy manager of the bank's foreign exchange department at the Brady House branch in Mumbai, was arrested by the CBI for helping jeweller Nirav Modi in conducting fraudulent transactions for over 11,000 crores. According to the CBI, Gokulnath Shetty and another bank employee Manoj Kharat issued eight letters of understanding (LOU) worth over Rs. 280 crores to Nirav Modi's company just three months before Shetty retired in May 2017. The LOUs were issued in February. The due date mentioned was January 2018.
The Punjab National Bank detected a 1.77 billion dollar scam in which Modi acquired fraudulent letters of undertaking from one of its branches for overseas credit from other Indian lenders. The scam was started in 2011 and was detected in the third week of January this year, after which the PNB officials reported it to the concerned agencies. Meanwhile, the PNB filed a second complaint with the CBI on February 13. The CBI had received the complaint from the PNB on January 28 and a case was registered in the case on January 31.
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