No role in Choksi’s disappearance: Antigua PM
After reports accusing Antigua prime minister Gaston Browne of playing a role in fugitive businessman Mehul Choksi’s disappearance from the country surfaced, he said on Monday that he had no clue about the alleged abduction.
“Let me state here that even though Choksi’s citizenship was unsettled, we respected his legal and constitutional rights as a citizen, and we did nothing to abridge those rights whilst he was on Antiguan and Barbudan soil,” Browne said, according to a report on news website Antigua Newsroom.
If Antigua was “desperate” to get rid of Choksi, Browne said, “The better option would have been to have the Indians come here, bring a plane and pack him up and send him back to India.”
The Indian businessman mysteriously disappeared from Antigua and Barbuda last Sunday and was detained by Dominican police on Tuesday night on charges of illegally entering the island. Dominica Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit also came under fire for allegedly collaborating and being “part of a plot against the rule of law” to send the fugitive diamantaire to India.
Dominica’s House of Assembly’s leader of the Opposition Lennox Linton said a “full investigation” should be made into the circumstances under which Choksi was brought to Dominica. The “obvious collaboration between Dominica, Antigua and India” and the officials who instructed or influenced the police to facilitate the inhumane transfer of Mehul Choksi to
Dominica should also be investigated, he added.
Choksi and his lawyers claimed that he was kidnapped and taken to Dominica against his will last week. On Monday, his lawyer Vijay Aggarwal also suggested that the businessman may have been honey-trapped by a woman he had known for six months. He had gone to her house when he was abducted and taken on a yacht to Dominica. Choksi faces multiple charges of embezzling funds from the Punjab National Bank (PNB) in India which is worth some ₹13,500 crore. He had acquired citizenship of Antigua under its Citizenship by Investment Programme (CIP) in November 2017.