Fugitive diamantaire Mehul Choksi is in fresh trouble after the Central Bureau of Investigation has booked him for allegedly exaggerating the value of diamonds and jewelery pledged to take a loan of Rs 25 crore. Officials said the new case was registered on Monday and along with Choksi his company Gitanjali Gems and valuers Surajmal Lallu Bhai & Co, Narendra Jhaveri, Pradeep C Shah and Shrenik Shah were also booked. CBI said Choksi had pledged “low quality laboratory diamonds and other inferior colored stones and not genuine gems” while taking the loan.
Choksi is already wanted along with his nephew Nirav Modi in a Rs 13,500 crore loan fraud case.
The central agency acted on a complaint by the Industrial Finance Corporation of India Ltd (IFCI), from which Choksi had got the loan. The financial institution alleged that Choksi had approached it in 2016 for a working capital loan of Rs 25 crore, for which he had pledged shares as well as gold and diamond jewellery.
According to the complaint lodged by IFCI, the pledged jewelery was in the range of Rs 34 crore to Rs 45 crore, on the basis of which Choksi’s loan was sanctioned. As the company allegedly defaulted on loan payments, IFCI started taking back the pledged shares and jewellery.
The complaint said that the company, however, was able to sell 6,48,822 shares worth Rs 4.07 crore out of a total of 20,60,054 pledged shares as Choksi’s client ID was blocked by the National Securities Depository Ltd.
Soon, the complaint said, the IFCI focused on pledged jewelery – gold, diamonds and studded jewelry – but its new valuation showed that their value was less than 98 per cent, which is less than Choksi’s initial reports on the loan. Was told at the time of taking. The latest valuation revealed that the value of the pledged jewelery ranged from Rs 70 lakh to a little over Rs 2 crore.
The IFCI alleged that Choksi “with dishonest and fraudulent intention to connive with the appraisers and get the pledged jewels to be valued at exorbitant and inflated values. The latest appraisal revealed that the diamonds were of low quality laboratory prepared chemical vapor diamonds.” and others were of inferior colour, stones and not genuine gems, the complaint said.
The complaint said the loan account was declared a non-performing asset on June 30, 2018, causing wrongful loss of more than Rs 22 crore to IFCI. “The CBI conducted searches at the premises of the accused assessees at eight locations in Kolkata and Mumbai. CBI spokesperson RC Joshi said incriminating documents were recovered.
Choksi is already accused of using fraudulent undertakings and foreign debentures to the tune of over Rs 6,344.96 crore from Punjab National Bank. The officials of PNB’s Brady House branch in Mumbai issued 165 letters of undertaking and 58 foreign letters of credit during March-April 2017, out of which 311 bills were discounted.
These were allegedly issued to Choksi’s firms without any permitted limits or cash margins and without entering the bank’s central banking system to evade scrutiny. Based on them, money was lent by SBI, Mauritius; Allahabad Bank, Hong Kong; Axis Bank, Hong Kong; Bank of India, Antwerp; Canara Bank, Mamna; and State Bank of India, Frankfurt.
(with PTI inputs)
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