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How our man confronted the world’s most-wanted billionaire
Mick Brown on Nirav Modi
Last year, The Telegraph did what the British police and the Indian government had failed to do: found India’s mostwanted man. That face-off with Nirav Modi, a diamond tycoon accused of fraud to the tune of £1.5 billion, became an internet sensation. Since then, Modi has languished in jail. On the eve of the extradition hearing to decide his fate, Mick
Brown looks back at that first encounter, and what followed
On a cold day in March of last year, I found myself standing outside a public latrine in London’s Soho Square, waiting for India’s most-wanted man.
He was Nirav Modi, a diamond dealer who for the past 14 months had been on the run from India, accused of having defrauded the Punjab National Bank of £1.5 billion – the largest financial fraud in the country’s history.
An Interpol Red Notice had been issued for Modi’s arrest, and his whereabouts had been a subject of fevered speculation. It was rumoured that he was in London, or New York, or possibly Antwerp – the diamonddealing centre of Europe, where he had business and family connections. But over the course of an investigation lasting several weeks, The Telegraph had done what the British police and Indian authorities had apparently failed to do: established Modi’s location, tracing him to an address in the luxury Centre Point apartment block in central London, and to the Georgian house in
I crossed the road and waited by the door. Robert raised a hand. The door opened and a man stepped on to the pavement. As he walked past I fell into step immediately behind him. ‘Mr Modi…’ I said. He turned and stopped in his tracks, a startled look on his face. We had got our man.
Nirav Modi, who – through his lawyers – has always protested his innocence of all charges against him, is presently in Wandsworth prison, where he has been kept on remand for the past 13 months, facing extradition proceedings. His numerous applications for bail have been turned down. A man who in 2017 was estimated by Forbes to have a personal fortune of £1.3 billion (ranking him at number 85 on the magazine’s India’s Richest owning a chain of retail outlets in prime locations throughout the world, and seeing his jewellery modelled by stars on the red carpet at the Academy Awards.
Modi, who is 49, is Jain, a religious community historically associated with banking and diamonds. Born into a family of jewellers, he grew up in Antwerp, learning the trade from his father, Deepak. Among his family, he once recalled, talking about diamonds was ‘our way of conversation’.
He went on to study at the Wharton business school of the University of Pennsylvania, but dropped out after little more than a year, moving to India to work in the wholesale diamond business run by his uncle Mehul Choksi.
Ninety per cent of diamonds mined across the world are cut and polished in India. In 1999, Modi established his own trading company, Firestar Diamond, and in 2008 he moved into jewellery design. The story would subsequently be recycled through many media interviews, of how a friend had
At the London launch ‘people were asking, “Where’s the money coming from?”’
One associate spoke of how he suffered ‘palpitations’ thinking of Modi’s ultimate aim: to open 100 stores worldwide, ‘when just opening five or 10 was an uphill journey’.
Modi liked to present himself as an enigma. In an interview with Fortune India magazine in 2015, he boasted of his outsider status in the Indian jewellery world: ‘Ask any jeweller in Mumbai if he has met me in the last decade,’ he said, ‘and the answer you’ll get is “no”.’
In person, he cut an anonymous figure – a polite, softly spoken man, short in stature and with prematurely receding hair, who claimed to lead a quiet life with his American-born wife, Ami, and their three children, in an apartment in an exclusive enclave of Mumbai. He enjoyed reading classical poetry, and slept with a copy of the Hindu scripture the Bhagavadgita at his bedside.
But this picture of a modest, contemplative family man belied the couple’s extravagant tastes. In the months following his departure from India, and as the investigation into his alleged fraud unfolded, the Indian Enforcement Directorate seized assets that would later be put up for public auction. A sale in March 2020 included a Rolls-royce Ghost (‘ideal’, according to the auction catalogue, ‘for long-distance travel’); a Porsche Panamera S; luxury watches; Hermès Birkin and Kelly handbags; and a staggering collection of artworks by celebrated Indian painters.
Ami had become a fixture among Mumbai’s so-called ‘frou frou’ set of hyperwealthy socialites and Bollywood stars. And their place in the highest echelons of Indian society was cemented when Modi’s brother Neeshal married Isheta Salgaocar, the niece of India’s wealthiest man, Mukesh Ambani, chairman of Reliance Industries.
In 2015 Modi launched his assault on the Western market, opening his first American store on Madison Avenue, within a couple of blocks of established jewellers such as Graff, De Beers and Tiffany & Co. He displayed a shrewd understanding of how to promote himself and play the luxury market at its own game by courting celebrities and the media. The Madison Avenue opening was a glitzy affair, attended by the actor Naomi Watts and Donald Trump Jr. The following year, Kate Winslet appeared on the red carpet at the Oscars draped in Modi jewellery, encrusted with almost 100 carats of diamonds. She declared that his ‘feminine, modern designs are among my very favourite’.
In October 2016, he opened store on Old Bond Street in London, the next step in a plan to supply ‘the missing piece’ in the
aHe played the luxury market at its own game by courting celebrities and the media
£230 billion-plus global jewellery marasian ket: an brand with international appeal. As members of the press and invited guests moved among the display cases, champagne glasses in hand, admiring the collections of diamond necklaces, bracelets and earrings with price tags of up to £300,000, Modi posed with the Bollywood star Lisa Haydon and the new ‘face’ of the brand, the supermodel Rosie Huntington-whiteley. Among the guests, the talk was of his astonishing ascent, apparently out of the blue, in the traditionally conservative and tight-knit world of luxury jewellery, and the huge sums being lavished on advertising and promotion.
‘People were asking, “Where’s the money coming from?”’ one guest remembers.
They would shortly find out.
On 17 January 2018, Modi left India suddenly. His wife and children had left shortly before him, bound for New York, telling friends there was an illness in the family.
Twelve days after his departure, the Punjab National Bank (PNB) filed a police complaint against Modi, his uncle Mehul Choksi and others, accusing them of fraud costing the bank 2.81 billion rupees (about £31 million, a figure that would later rise to £1.5 billion). His passport was frozen, and Interpol issued a Red Notice against him, listing a string of charges including criminal conspiracy and money laundering. (A Red Notice is a request to ‘locate and provisionally arrest an individual pending extradition’.)
It was alleged that Modi, with the connivance of senior bank officials, had acquired fraudulent letters of undertaking on behalf of a number of shell companies from the PNB branch in Mumbai, in order to obtain overseas credit from other Indian lenders – ultimately leading to an ‘evergreening’ of loans, which ballooned to an enormous sum.
In India, Modi’s flight and the allegations against him became a scandal. In March 2018, during celebrations for the festival of Holi,
a 50ft effigy of him was paraded through the streets of Mumbai and burned.
It would subsequently be revealed that Modi had entered the UK on a so-called ‘golden visa’, a Tier 1 (Investor) visa, issued to people outside the European Economic Area on a commitment to invest £2 million in the UK, which allows a person to work, study or set up a business in the country. The visa had been issued some time before the details of his alleged fraud surfaced.
In August 2018, the Indian government, having established that Modi was in the UK, sent two requests to the British government seeking his extradition back to India. But no extradition proceedings had begun.
That was the situation when, in December 2018, The Telegraph published an extensive article chronicling Modi’s rise and precipitous fall. His boast that before his sudden ascent to prominence in Mumbai nobody knew who he was had taken on a prophetic air. Nobody now wanted to know him, and they certainly did not want to talk about having been associated with him. His store on New Bond Street still bore his name, but dust was gathering on the elaborate window displays, and unpaid bills were scattered on the doormat.
Shortly after publication, The Telegraph received a tip-off, suggesting that not only was Modi living in London, but he was back in the diamond business. We established that shortly after arriving in Britain, despite being a fugitive, Modi had rented an apartment, applied for a National Insurance number in his own name, opened online bank accounts, and affiliated with a diamond-trading company, registered at Companies House in the name Diamond Holdings – from which, it would later be revealed, he was drawing a salary of £20,000 a month.
Modi’s wife, Ami, and their children were still in New York. In March 2019, she too would be charged for her alleged involvement in laundering proceeds from fraudulent activity, in order to buy a $30 million Central Park flat, where she was believed to be living.
Watching Modi over a period of several days, it became apparent that he had adopted a surprisingly nonchalant attitude to his fugitive status. A man of habit, he would leave his Centre Point apartment at about the same time each morning, walking his small dog the few hundred yards to his office in Soho Square.
If it could be called hiding, he was hiding in plain sight.
It would be fair to say that on the day I fell into step with him, Nirav Modi was not pleased to see me. As I started asking questions about his case, a mixture of panic and confusion flickered in his eyes. ‘No comment,’ he said, and walked away. I accompanied him as he crossed over Oxford Street and then stopped, anxiously looking for a taxi, continuing to reply, ‘No comment,’ to every question. It is virtually impossible to find an empty taxi on Oxford Street, but Modi seemed frozen to the spot. I could feel an odd sort of companionship developing between us, as if we were trapped in a Beckett play. By now I was running out of questions. Bizarrely, I found myself asking whether I might help him get a taxi. Or perhaps he should consider walking? ‘No comment.’
Eventually, after what seemed like a lifetime, and to the relief of both of us, a taxi pulled up and he climbed inside. The first thing he did was reach for his phone. The car crawled down Oxford Street, Emma and I keeping step beside it, before coming to a stop outside Centre Point. Noticing us, Modi hurried off in another direction. It seemed pointless to follow him.
On Saturday 9 March, The Telegraph broke the story, ‘Tracked down by The Telegraph: World’s Most Wanted Billionaire’. Within 24 hours, the video of my awkward encounter with Modi had registered more than 1.5 million hits. The vast majority were in India, where his discovery led every TV news bulletin. The £10,000 ostrich-hide jacket he had been wearing – a detail provided by a Telegraph fashion editor – was a particular talking point.
The story apparently spurred the Home Office into action. Within a matter of days, then Home Secretary Sajid Javid announced that he had certified India’s extradition request. On 18 March, Westminster Magistrates’ Court issued a warrant for Modi’s arrest. The next day, he was detained after being recognised by a clerk in a bank where he was trying to open an account, who promptly notified the police.
The following day, Modi appeared at Westminster Magistrates’ Court, where all extradition cases are heard, for a bail hearing. These hearings are a dispiriting spectacle. Many of the cases involve accusations of people trafficking, and proceed at an agonising pace. The applications for bail have a depressing uniformity, and the judges have a weary air that suggests they have heard it all before. Over the next 12 months, in the days I sat in court for the Modi proceedings, not a single person was granted bail.
In this sorry parade of desperation, greed and opportunism, the appearance of a diamond tycoon might have been expected to bring a sprinkle of specious glamour to the proceedings. But on his first appearance in court, seated behind the glass screen, a guard at his side, Modi looked only crushed and bewildered, shuffling papers and listening intently as the details of the charges against him were read out.
Modi, his lawyer said, strongly contested the allegations. There were ‘political considerations’. He was not on the run at all; he had come to Britain perfectly legally to prepare his company for an IPO. He had strong ties to the country. He had ‘a contract of employment’ with Diamond Holdings. He paid National Insurance and council tax. His passport had been seized. He was ‘the opposite of a flight risk’. He would offer £500,000 security and was willing to report regularly to the police. When the bail application was denied, he slumped visibly in his seat.
Over the coming months he would reappear at regular intervals, mostly via video link, sitting with a hang-dog expression while the presiding judge thumbed through the details of his case, listened to the pleas for bail and refused them.
It emerged that there were allegations that agents of Modi had been interfering with witnesses, attempting to bribe or intimidate them. Under his instructions, it was claimed, evidence on computers and phones that could be used against him had been destroyed. His lawyer, meanwhile, expressed concerns about his well-being. Conditions in Wandsworth were ‘unliveable’ and made the preparation of his case impossible. He regarded Britain as a ‘safe haven’ where he believed his case would be ‘heard fairly’. Modi’s lawyer was not prepared to talk to me.
In June, Modi appeared before the court via video link. His lawyers argued that he was ‘not Julian Assange’, but ‘just an ordinary Indian jeweller’. The amount he was prepared to advance in security had risen from
His lawyers argued that he was ‘not Julian Assange’, but ‘just an ordinary jeweller’
£500,000 to £2 million – a fact that, the Crown Prosecution lawyer was quick to point out, suggested he had access to ample funds to facilitate him fleeing the country. His application for bail was once again refused.
In November, he appeared once more in person. A rumour had spread that a new bail package had been negotiated and he would be released that day. The court was fuller than usual, and Modi’s legal team seemed larger and more relaxed. He had brushed up his appearance, wearing a white shirt with his hair neatly parted.
For Modi, his lawyer argued, prison was becoming unendurable. He was locked in his cell for 22 hours a day. He was suffering from ‘moderate depression’, had been assaulted in his cell, and had threatened to kill himself if extradition was ordered. He was now offering £4 million in security for bail; a 24-hour curfew, which amounted to house arrest – a similar condition, his lawyer pointed out, to that placed on suspected terrorists – with 12 hours of security a day provided by a private guard; electronic tagging; email monitoring and the restriction of phone calls to only his lawyers… a package ‘unprecedented in scope and stringency’. Bail was again refused.
And in prison he stays.
Modi’s extradition hearing next week is essentially a trial before a trial. The judge must be satisfied that the allegations against him satisfy the criteria for extradition, and must also decide if extradition would be disproportionate or incompatible with his human rights – an important factor in the case of Modi, whose lawyers have argued that he ‘strongly contests’ the allegations against him, and will raise a number of objections relating to ‘political motivation and human rights’.
A significant factor in considering extradition to India is the conditions in the country’s prisons, which are widely recognised as appalling. A Home Office document published in 2019, for use by officials handling particular types of protection and human rights claims, cited a report of overcrowding being ‘well above 150 per cent in many prisons and in one case as high as 609 per cent’. There were reports of ‘dilapidated buildings; inadequate food; lack of access to fresh water and medical care; poor sanitation and environmental conditions… and a lack of heat and ventilation’. Beds, it stated, are not always provided. A report by the US Department of State had noted that conditions in India’s prisons were ‘frequently life-threatening’.
Despite an extradition treaty between the UK and India, which was signed in 1992, only one person – out of 28 cases – has been extradited since then. There are 16 cases, including Modi’s, currently pending.
Modi aside, perhaps the most famous Indian fugitive in Britain is Vijay Mallya, the former head of Kingfisher Airlines, an exuberant figure known in India as the ‘king of good times’. In 2013 the airline collapsed, owing about £870 million. Mallya is accused of being a ‘wilful defaulter’ under Indian law, and faces accusations of money laundering and misappropriation. Like Modi, he had the good fortune to be in Britain when the charges against him were laid. On 18 April 2017, he was arrested by the Metropolitan Police extradition unit ‘on behalf of the Indian authorities in relation to accusations of fraud’, and was released on bail pending further consideration of the case.
He has been fighting his case in the courts ever since. In December of 2018, it was ruled that he could be extradited to India to face fraud charges. Last month, Mallya lost his appeal in the High Court, leaving an appeal to the Supreme Court as his final chance to avoid extradition.
The two charges that Nirav Modi faces in India, conspiracy to defraud and conspiracy to conceal criminal property, carry respective maximum sentences of seven years and life. In his cell in Wandsworth prison, he will have been watching Mallya’s case with great interest – and fervently hoping that he will not be setting foot in India any time soon.