Confidence Does It

Top bank employees, government agencies like the ED and a lax system enabled Nirav Modi to pull off his con.

- Aniruddha Bahal

ABOUT a month after we became aware of Nirav Modi defrauding the Punjab National Bank (PNB) of nearly Rs 14,000 crore, I got a call from a UK-based company staffed with private investigators. They had contacted me earlier to chat about the affairs of an international fund investing in Indian start-ups. This time around, the voice at the other end was enquiring about Nirav. I promptly shot offthe FIR that the PNB had registered in the case. But then it got interesting. He said that the client they represented wanted to “find out what was happening in the case for the person was public spirited and wanted such rascals to be brought to justice”.

It smelt fishy. In my entire career as a journalist, I have yet to meet such a publicspirited person who would spend money on a gold-plated firm in the UK to find out if a criminal case was being investigated properly in India. I said as much and said that it sounded more like Nirav had himself hired them to snoop around and if that were the case I couldn’t really chat with them further on the topic. The guy went offthe line promptly.