A Mumbai court has rejected a request by Purvi Modi, sister of fugitive diamantaire Nirav Modi, to appear before the Central Bureau of Investigation via video conference, observing that her physical presence was necessary for detailed questioning and confrontation with the “voluminous” documents, accounts and transactions involved in the case.
The central development
The fraud, uncovered in 2018, allegedly involved officials from PNB’s Brady House branch in Mumbai who issued the unauthorised LoUs to Modi’s firms. The total loss to PNB was estimated at ₹ 6,498 crore. Modi, the mastermind behind the PNB scam, has been fighting his extradition process from the UK, where the authorities arrested him in 2019.
The transactions went unnoticed for several years due to collusion by bank officials.
People Involved
In his order on Monday, special CBI judge SK Karhale noted that Purvi, a Belgian citizen, had failed to respond to a notice issued by the investigating officer in June 2022.
Investigation and Response
The judge also stressed that under Indian criminal law, the investigating officer (IO) of a case exercises complete control over its investigation and “an accused or an approver cannot dictate how the IO should conduct the investigation. Her lawyer argued that the law and the rules of the high court and the CBI manual permitted statements to be recorded through video conferencing. CBI opposed the request, saying Purvi was a beneficiary of the alleged fraud and hadn’t cooperated with the investigation. The court agreed with the CBI.
This, the court said, prima facie showed that she had not cooperated with the investigation. In his request, Purvi told the court that she was settled in Belgium and had been cooperating with the agency. The agency said it wanted to question her in person and that provisions allowing video conferencing did not give her a right to insist on being examined remotely. “In these kinds of serious cases, when the Investigating Officer is insisting on physical presence of the proposed accused, Mrs Purvi Modi, because of her crucial role in the alleged crime, the opportunity of making a fair investigation has to be given to him,” the court said.
