The High Court in London on Thursday refused fugitive diamond merchant Nirav Modi’s application to appeal to the UK Supreme Court against his extradition to India to face charges of fraud and money laundering. On November 9, the high court had given the green signal to his extradition to India.
In a judgment order pronounced at the Royal Courts of Justice in London, Lord Justice Jeremy Stuart-Smith and Justice Robert Jay ruled that “the Appellant’s (Nirav Modi) application for permission to appeal to the Supreme Court is refused”.
On November 9, the High Court in London ruled that the 51-year-old Modi’s risk of suicide is not such that it would be either unjust or oppressive to extradite him to India to face charges of fraud and money laundering.
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Lord Justice Jeremy Stuart-Smith and Justice Robert Jay had said in their verdict that District Judge Sam Goozee’s Westminster Magistrates’ Court order from last year in favor of extradition was “sound”.
The leave to appeal in the High Court had been granted on two grounds – under Article 3 of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) to hear arguments if it would “unjust or oppressive” to extradite Modi due to his mental state and Section 91 of the Extradition Act 2003, also related to mental health.
“Pulling these various strands together and weighing them in the balance so as to reach an overall evaluative judgment on the question raised by Section 91, we are far from satisfied that Modi’s mental condition and the risk of suicide are such that it would be either unjust or oppressive to extradite him,” the ruling stated.
“It may be that the main benefit of the appeal has been to obtain the extensive further [Indian government] assurances that we have identified in the course of this judgment, which render the position clear to Modi’s advantage and the District Judge’s decision supportable,” the judges ruled.
Even if he exhausts all remedies in the UK courts, Modi could still seek a so-called Rule 39 injunction from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). Therefore, the process of bringing him back to India to be lodged at Arthur Road Jail in Mumbai and stand trial for fraud and money laundering amounting to an estimated USD 2 billion in the Punjab National Bank (PNB) loan scam case still has some way to go, news agency PTI had reported.
Meanwhile, Modi is lodged at Wandsworth Prison in south-west London since his arrest in March 2019. He is the subject of two sets of criminal proceedings, with the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) case relating to a large-scale fraud upon PNB through the fraudulent obtaining of letters of undertaking (LoUs) or loan agreements, and the Enforcement Directorate (ED) case relating to the laundering of the proceeds of that fraud.
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He also faces two additional charges of “causing the disappearance of evidence” and intimidating witnesses or “criminal intimidation to cause death”, which were added to the CBI case.
(with inputs from PTI)
