Fugitive diamond service provider Nirav Modi, whose extradition to India was ordered final month by UK Home Secretary Priti Patel within the estimated USD 2-billion Punjab National Bank (PNB) rip-off case, has filed an utility for permission to attraction in opposition to the order within the High Court in London. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) confirmed an attraction has been lodged however a High Court decide who will decide on the matter is but to be assigned.
The matter has not been despatched to a decide for consideration on the papers, the Administrative Division of the Royal Courts of Justice in London mentioned this week. In the primary occasion, a High Court decide will decide on the papers submitted for the attraction and decide if there are any grounds for an attraction in opposition to the Home Secretary’s choice or the Westminster Magistrates Court February ruling in favour of Modi’s extradition to India to face costs of fraud and cash laundering.
Following that call, there may be scope for the defence workforce to hunt an oral listening to to plead their case. There are not any sure time-frames for the authorized processes concerned, which might take months. We are ready to see in the event that they do apply for permission to attraction. If they’re allowed to attraction then we’d contest any attraction proceedings on behalf of the GOI (authorities of India), a CPS spokesperson had mentioned earlier.
Meanwhile, 50-year-old Modi stays behind bars at Wandsworth Prison in south-west London since his arrest over two years in the past on March 19, 2019. In his ruling in February, District Judge Sam Goozee mentioned that the diamond service provider has a case to reply earlier than the Indian courts and that the bars to extradition beneath UK legislation don’t apply in his case.
As a part of a really complete judgment, the decide concluded that he was happy that there’s proof upon which Modi might be convicted in relation to the conspiracy to defraud the PNB. A prima facie case is established, he mentioned, in relation to all counts of costs introduced by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and Enforcement Directorate (ED) — together with cash laundering, intimidation of witnesses and disappearance of proof.
The courtroom had additionally accepted that whereas Modi’s psychological well being had deteriorated as a result of prolonged incarceration in a London jail, exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, his threat of suicide didn’t meet the excessive threshold to conclude that it could be “unjust or oppressive” to extradite him. Modi is the topic of two units of felony proceedings, with the CBI case referring to a large-scale fraud upon PNB by way of the fraudulent acquiring of letters of enterprise (LoUs) or mortgage agreements, and the ED case referring to the laundering of the proceeds of that fraud. He additionally faces two further costs of “causing the disappearance of evidence” and intimidating witnesses or felony intimidation to trigger demise, which have been added on to the CBI case.
As witnessed within the extradition case of former Kingfisher Airlines chief Vijay Mallya — who stays on bail within the UK whereas a confidential matter, believed to be associated to an asylum request, is resolved — there may be nonetheless some strategy to go earlier than Modi could be moved from Wandsworth Prison in London to Barrack 12 Arthur Road Jail in Mumbai and face trial in India.
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