The ED had seized gold, diamonds, jewellery, expensive watches, luxury cars, and paintings in February.
Highlights
- Celebrity jewellers accused of scamming PNB of Rs 13,000 crore
- At height of scandal, investigators said Rs 7,800 crore recovered
- Now they say value of seized assets was grossly inflated
Celebrity jewellers Mehul Choksi and Nirav Modi's assets seized by probe agencies after they fled the country are worth Rs 3,800 crore, less than half of the Rs 7,800 crore estimated by agencies earlier, an official at the Enforcement Directorate told NDTV after a fresh revaluation of the seized assets.
The sharp drop in the revaluation conducted by the Enforcement Directorate, the central agency mandated to probe financial crimes, comes after suggestions that probe agencies could have erred by using the retail value of the jewellery to estimate the worth of its seizures. The fresh revaluation was ordered to address this criticism.
The ED has also written to the custom department to initiate proceedings against the duo for selling low-quality goods at higher prices. The Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) has already filed a case of overvaluation against Nirav Modi.
Suspicions regarding the estimates were raised when two men associated with Nirav Modi's jewellery chain had revealed that the company routinely exaggerated the value of the jewellery it sold. Its books, they said, were likely to contain the inflated prices, which would mean that the value of the jewellery seized by the agency was much less than the investigators are expecting.
"I am afraid if a proper evaluation by a government approved valuer is done... I would not be surprised if the value is found to be 10-20% of what people are quoting," Santosh Srivastava, who was the Managing Director of Gitanjali between 2009 and 2013, had said.
It was also noticed during the scrutiny of documents available that goods worth Rs 890 crore involving customs duty of around Rs 52 crore, appear to have been diverted by the duty-free Special Economic Zone (SEZ) units of the Nirav Modi group of companies to the domestic market.
The court has sought their appearance on September 25 and 26 -- Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi, respectively -- under the fugitive economic offender law.
Mehul Choksi and his nephew Nirav Modi are wanted by multiple investigating agencies after state-owned Punjab National Bank (PNB) complained against their companies, saying it had been cheated of Rs 13,600 crore through fraudulent issue of letters of undertaking (LoUs). Both had fled India in January, a few weeks before the scam was unearthed.
In February, the ED had seized gold, diamonds, jewellery, precious stones, expensive watches, luxury cars, and paintings etc during 260 searches. Several properties were also attached by the agency.
It had filed two separate applications against the duo before the special court that hears matters under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA).
Non-bailable warrants were issued against the two, while an Interpol 'red corner' arrest warrant has been issued against Nirav Modi on the request of the ED.
The agency recently moved the court seeking to declare the diamond traders as "fugitive economic offenders" and wants to confiscate their assets worth Rs 3,500 crore, including those located in the United Kingdom and the UAE.
Meanwhile, Mehul Choksi, who has refused to return to India saying he would be killed by mobs if he were brought back, has moved to Antigua and got a local passport. The Antiguan authorities informed the Enforcement Directorate that Mehul Choksi arrived there this month and has taken the passport of that country.