A London court on Thursday extended the remand of fugitive diamond merchant Nirav Modi till June 27. The diamantaire is fighting his extradition to India in the nearly $2 billion Punjab National Bank (PNB) fraud and money laundering case.
The 48-year-old has been lodged at Wandsworth prison in south-west London since his third attempt at seeking bail was rejected by Chief Magistrate Emma Arbuthnot at the last hearing at Westminster Magistrates' Court earlier this month.
"This is a large fraud and the doubling of security to 2 million pounds is not sufficient to cover a combination of concerns that he would fail to surrender," Arbuthnot had ruled at the last hearing on May 8.
"A combination of interference with witnesses, destruction of servers and mobile phones and the lack of community ties means I still have doubts that he would fail to surrender before the court," she concluded.
Modi was arrested by uniformed Scotland Yard officers on an extradition warrant from a Metro Bank branch in central London as he attempted to open a new bank account on March 19 and has been in prison since.
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In the subsequent hearings, Westminster Magistrates' Court was told that Modi was the "principal beneficiary" of the fraudulent issuance of letters of undertaking (LoUs) as part of a conspiracy to defraud PNB and then laundering the proceeds of crime.
Modi's legal team, led by solicitor Anand Doobay, have repeatedly asserted that the Indian authorities must present a "perfectly paginated" set of documents in support of the case against their client. It is a direct reference to the disorganised state of the paperwork in previous Indian extradition cases, most recently that of liquor tycoon Vijay Mallya.
Arbuthnot, the judge who had ordered the Mallya extradition in December 2018, has been very firm with the CPS, representing the Indian government, about proper indexing of all documents to be submitted to the court in relation to the case.
