Bad Boy Billionaires: India (2020) s01e02 Episode Script

WOMAN #1: He's carved out a global empire,
and today, we have as our guest,
jeweler extraordinaire, Nirav Modi.
Nirav, whoever we've interviewed,
we've been very particular -
they have to have
they have to be totally honest,
they have to have good ethics
and morality in their business dealings.
- I mean, your reputation precedes you.
- Thank you.
So, our, our
To be a jeweler,
it's all about having trust, right?
Because when a person is spending
lakhs and crores on jewelry, it's about
The brand has to embody trust.
[UP-TEMPO STRING INSTRUMENTS PLAYING]
WOMAN #2: Luxury had just happened to India.
No longer were we only
looking at the Guccis and the Pradas.
Today, we were looking at Indian brands,
and Nirav Modi was that brand.
[MUSIC CONTINUES]
It seemed like this beautiful,
aesthetic fantasy.
He really had this vision for, like,
a multinational jewelry brand,
something like Tiffany's.
WOMAN #3: He was bold, he was taking risks.
It felt like he had all the right pieces
in this puzzle.
It's very hard to make that much noise
without obscene amounts
of money behind you.
He did everything right.
You could never have expected things
to ever go wrong.
[MUSIC CONTINUES]
WOMAN #2: It was this strange
unending fountain of money
that he seemed to have always.
Where was it coming from?
It was very difficult for anyone to know
or suspect that something was wrong
until it all actually came tumbling out.
This is the biggest corporate fraud
that has taken place in India.
Big hunt for India's biggest thief,
Nirav Modi, is hotting up.
Nirav Modi came out of nowhere,
created this beautiful image,
had a beautiful product,
he controlled his narrative,
he controlled his whole story,
and then he was gone.
[MUSIC FADES OUT]
[THEME MUSIC PLAYING]
[MUSIC FADES OUT]
[CAMERA SHUTTERS CLICKING]
MAN: The world of fashion
and the world of luxury,
it loves a good story,
but it also loves to be bedazzled
and to be beguiled.
Nirav Modi first came across my radar
at a time when he was beginning
to really make himself known in the West.
He had come out of India
very, very quickly,
he opened up jewelry stores in New York,
then in London.
He had a big launch when he opened
the store in Old Bond Street.
He had hired Rosie Huntington-Whiteley,
who was a top fashion model,
as the face of his brand.
The jewelry is just so elegant.
It's timeless, but contemporary,
and that is certainly what I look for.
And I think at that point,
it was so bedazzling
that very few people seemed to have
actually stopped and asked,
"Hold on a second. Who is this guy?"
My grandfather
and my father were diamantaires.
I'm a third generation diamantaire.
He arrived
with this very well-crafted story.
My mother was an interior designer
and I've been surrounded by diamonds
and art from a very young age.
And that story had obviously
been well polished by various PR people.
We wanted to create
India's first luxury brand.
And the more one looked at this,
the more interesting it became really,
because, how had he managed
to establish himself quite so quickly
and quite so conspicuously,
as a figure in the world diamond scene?
[BELL CLANGING]
[TRAIN HORN BLOWING]
MAN #1: Nirav Modi came from
a very traditional
Gujarati family of jewelers.
His father was a jeweler
and his uncle was a jeweler.
It's a very tight-knit community,
very closed off to the outside world.
It operates on honor and trust.
And their main industry
has been the cutting and polishing
and processing of rough diamonds.
[IN HINDI] MAN #2: Throughout the world,
Surat is known as the Diamond City.
The rough diamonds that are mined
in Africa, Russia, Australia
are polished here in Surat's factories.
[MACHINE WHIRRING]
There are approximately one million people
associated with the diamond industry here.
Almost 90% of the world's diamonds
are polished in Surat
and the polished diamonds
are then exported
all over the world from here.
[INDISTINCT CHATTER]
SUBRAMANIAN: It is an intensely clannish industry.
Uh, it would work on trust,
kinship networks, family networks
[INDISTINCT CHATTER]
SUBRAMANIAN: and that's how Nirav Modi
came to enter the diamond industry.
He really apprenticed with his uncle.
That was his big first introduction into
the jewelry business as a professional.
These may just look like pieces of glass
or even plastic to you,
but they are actually not,
are they Mr. Choksi?
No, they are absolutely,
they are a very high quality
of diamonds, in fact.
MODI: I give a lot of credit to
to my uncle.
He's very kind, he's very kind,
and he has been a great inspiration.
I worked for him for ten years
and I learned everything from him.
We do about $80-- $70, $80 million
of rough that we source from
SUBRAMANIAN: The Gujarati jewelry
business is largely very discreet,
very quiet -
Mehul Choksi was not like that.
Mehul Choksi wore the finest suits
and owned a yacht,
and, uh, listed his business,
Gitanjali Gems, on the stock exchange.
[INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC PLAYING]
[CROWD APPLAUDING]
Mehul had a very dodgy reputation
and left a lot of, uh, unpaid bills.
There were lots of court cases
against him.
Then, of course, there were rumors of,
you know, him not paying people
for the work they did for him
the models - one of them who I know -
who he didn't pay her fee,
but he paid her in diamonds,
and then, she later found out
that they were not real.
So, Mehul, um, was hugely unpopular.
[CROWD CONTINUES APPLAUDING]
[IN HINDI] In this industry,
you get to know what a person is like
from the way they talk
and the way they pay.
So, when I realized
he wasn't good with payments
and wasn't behaving properly,
I completely stopped
doing business with him.
Some continued, I'm not saying
no one did business with him,
but, I guess, there are all types.
[CROWD CHEERING]
learned the trade from him
and had subsequently built on his sense
of what that trade ought to be.
I think Mehul
had similar ambitions to Nirav Modi
and so, they were bound
by that kind of vision for their companies
and maybe also the ways in which
that vision could be achieved.
In 1999, Nirav Modi
split away from his uncle
and he started Firestar Diamond.
Nirav Modi felt he could probably achieve
a similar scale of success
like his uncle -
essentially, diamond cutting
and diamond polishing,
and making jewelry for other people.
[IN HINDI] SHAH: Nirav Modi's factory
employed about 1,800 to 2,000 people.
It was a jewelry factory.
And the way Nirav worked
was he would pay people with cash.
He would buy stock with cash
and give people advance cash payments.
As a business person
starting a new business,
if they are behaving responsibly
and they are paying people properly
this is how Nirav was able
to create a unique image for himself.
I went to Firestar to be trained
in 2007 in Nirav Modi's factory.
That was my first job.
The conditions there
were unlike anywhere else -
there was a creche, subsidized restaurant,
a doctor was provided.
Nirav Modi did a lot for the poor.
He talked to everyone,
he had no arrogance
about being a big factory owner.
He talked to his employees.
INGLE: Nirav Modi was like a God to us.
Nirav sir is the "Diamond King".
is essentially labor intensive
and it's low end, it's low margin.
You need to polish a lot of diamonds
to make the kind of profit
that you would want.
The setting and the selling and the retail
of diamonds and jewelry at a high-end,
that is a high-margin business,
that's where the real profits lie.
LALL: And that is, essentially,
what tipped the scales
for Nirav to go after.
Modi realized that,
"What I'm doing is no different
to what 20 other jewelers are doing
and the chance for me
to create a mark in my industry
is by doing something
that no other Indian jeweler had done."
Which is, essentially,
building a luxury brand.
- [INDISTINCT CHATTER]
- [CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKING]
Sometime around 2010,
Nirav started, uh, researching,
uh, catalogues -
Sotheby's, Christie's -
in Hong Kong and Asian markets
getting really deep into what made
the covers of those
auction houses' catalogues.
He started studying how pieces were sold,
he started getting a very strong sense
of the kinds of jewelry that people bought
and that went
for the highest auction prices.
- Sold!
- [APPLAUSE]
He decides he wants to make a big splash
and he designs this beautiful necklace,
uh, filled with diamonds
from the fabled Golconda mines
in South India.
[INAUDIBLE]
INTERVIEWER: When you started off,
which was the first milestone
that you felt that this was going
to take you to the next level?
Was it-- was it in Hong Kong?
- With the Golconda piece?
- Yes.
LALL: Golconda, essentially, represents,
the best of the best in terms of diamonds.
Some of the finest, biggest, best diamonds
in the world have come from Golconda.
It's the Rolls Royce of diamonds,
if you will.
One of the greatest coups in his career
was setting this Golconda diamond.
The diamond necklace set in
what was known as "the lotus design".
MODI: Christie's heard about
this necklace and it was like,
"You know, we hear about this necklace,
but we don't know who this person is."
They called up and said, you know,
"Can you show us this necklace?"
They just saw the layout, the design,
and
they loved it.
SUBRAMANIAN: The Golconda necklace
featured on the cover
of a Christie's auction catalogue.
He was the first ever Indian jeweler
to feature on the cover.
It sold for more than $3 million.
And, of course, that catapulted him
into even greater recognition.
INTERVIEWER: Who bought it?
It was bought
by as Taiwanese, uh, industrialist.
INTERVIEWER: Really?
Who would have thought?
INTERVIEWER: A Taiwanese industrialist?
For his wife?
- Yes, of course. [LAUGHS]
- INTERVIEWER: Well, we hope his wife.
We hope for his wife.
You never know today.
[POLICE SIREN BLARES]
[TOOL WHIRRING]
MAN: I'm a jeweler, a fine jeweler, um,
manufacturing mostly one-of-a-kind pieces
both for the industry
and for a private clientele.
I guess, I met Nirav, uh,
sometime around
So, when he decided he wanted to open
a factory in India making high jewelry,
he approached me and asked
if I'd be interested in getting involved.
One of the things
he said to me early on was,
"We buy German cars,
we buy French handbags,
we buy Italian clothes
why can't there be
a world-class Indian jeweler?"
I decided that I'd take a shot
at working with him
um
and that's how it all started.
And so, in May 2011, I moved to Mumbai.
I felt like I had landed
on another planet.
But I felt really welcome,
I felt really supported,
and I felt very confident
that Nirav knew what he was biting off
and was committed
to making it a global brand.
He believed in hiring top talent
and letting them do what they did best,
and it worked.
I was working in fashion
and I was shooting a lot of magazine work
and I was shooting a lot of, um,
jewelry ads.
Both of these came together with Nirav,
the world of fashion
and the world of jewelry.
So, when I first got a call from them,
from their office, it was very exciting.
He wanted just to create a lot of content,
to create a buzz about the brand.
Jewelry in India had always been, sort of,
like in this fantasy traditional world
of the Maharajas
and there was a certain lineage.
Nirav was, he was different.
He was trying to do new things,
uh, with jewelry,
so it was very exciting.
He had a very strong notion
of the Nirav Modi woman.
She was modern, she was Indian.
She came from India,
but she was at home anywhere in the world.
Like I said,
he brought something from his life
and from his legacy and his being Indian
and he put it on the world stage -
a certain amount of success,
self-confidence,
of pride in the new India.
I became familiar with Nirav Modi
when the brand started
popping up all over the place.
So, there were billboards
all around the city.
We were suddenly seeing
this completely new brand of jewelry
emerging out of nowhere.
He came on the scene so suddenly
and he was all over.
I mean, he started with a store in Delhi
and then he was here in Bombay,
then there was another store in Bombay.
When I visited his store,
I learned so many things just about
the technique of setting diamonds,
and he spent a lot of time with me
showing me around
and about, you know, invisible settings
and how you couldn't see the clasp.
His jewelry was gobsmackingly beautiful.
KANTRA: As I got to spend time with him,
I found him to be extremely focused.
He has a very good design sense about him.
He was always very interested
in pushing the technical limits
of the craft.
He always married aesthetics
with technique.
You know?
Like, he was really invested in that.
And there was this one bangle
OK It was a stretchable bangle.
Each bracelet
had over a hundred components in it
and had seven different
types of springs internally
to make them function properly.
When it collapsed, it looked like a bangle
that was totally intact and sovereign,
and when you pulled it,
the links would open up.
Just, it worked so beautifully.
He was so happy
and so proud of that piece.
Think of it in terms
of interlocking of hands
between a man and a woman.
It's very playful, it's very comfortable,
and it caresses your--
- INTERVIEWER: It's seamless.
- It is.
VERMA: He wanted that bangle to communicate.
We told a little story of, like,
little children in one of the films,
who were playful,
where they were holding hands,
and as they were going round and round
the circle was stretching and collapsing.
We tried to communicate the joy of that
little piece of jewelry in so many ways.
The resources were there.
The resources were there
to make your visions come alive.
In all my time in working with Nirav,
I never was told to cut a corner
or save a dollar if, you know,
spending it or taking your time
is going to improve the piece.
As Nirav Modi's brand expanded,
I don't think anybody really questioned
how a privately held company like that
was raising its money.
Beginning in 2011,
Nirav Modi is just expanding his empire
and he finds that he needs a new way
to fund his business.
He started to take a series of loans
from Punjab National Bank,
a big state-owned bank in India.
To get these loans,
he used a uniquely Indian financial
instrument called a Letter of Undertaking.
So, a Letter of Undertaking
is basically a document
that a bank in your country gives you
which you then use to get credit
from a bank in a foreign country.
SUBRAMANIAN: It's a way to raise foreign exchange
without paying enormous amounts
of conversion fees and so on.
And because it's a relatively
inexpensive way of sourcing
US dollars or British pounds
or whatever it may be,
a lot of other businesses
were using that as well.
LALL: When you get the Letter of Undertaking,
you're supposed to put down collateral,
which can be a percentage of the amount
of money that you have borrowed.
What Nirav Modi wasn't doing
was providing the bank
with that collateral,
that cash collateral,
and the way he was able
to get away without doing that
was by bribing officials
in the Punjab National Bank.
Essentially, he's being given free money.
There was really one physical location
that was a nerve center
of this entire enterprise
and that was the branch
of Punjab National Bank
in a building called Brady House
in South Bombay.
It's a dingy little office.
It didn't seem like the kind of venue
that would host a criminal enterprise.
[IN HINDI]
Basically, I'm a clerk
and this was the first job
I had in my life,
so it was a special kind of happiness.
A desk clerk is a junior role,
a single window operator.
Data entry, only data entry.
There was a huge amount
of work to do in Brady House.
There were around 30 to 40 payments
to be put through each day,
and on average seven to eight
Letters of Undertaking.
Firestar Diamonds
was a company name that I knew,
all the documents would come to me.
To me, it didn't look
like anything suspicious was going on.
My senior would give me the order
to do this work.
How could I not do it?
of this banking fraud was so hidden away
from, uh, not only public consumption,
but even the consumption
of people in the bank or in the company.
It was very difficult for anyone to know
or suspect that something was wrong.
Fashion magazines loved the brand
because he was spending
a lot of money on advertising
and on sponsorships of events
and things like that.
So [CHUCKLES]
you know, we all loved him for that.
JAMVWAL: His jewelry became a status symbol,
it became something important.
People would actually say,
"You know, this is a Nirav Modi."
He seemed to have got the pulse
of India's taste at the time
and of charming the charmed circles -
that's what Nirav aspired to belong to.
His wife Ami Modi
is the most interesting character for me.
She came from a very well educated,
a very cultured and a well-known
diamond family in New York.
You know,
if Nirav Modi brought in the money,
his wife Ami brought in
the social connections.
JAMVWAL: She was the right wife to have,
who knew the right people socially.
When he opened his stores,
she would play host.
VERMA: He was very camera shy
and he was very attention shy.
He was there as the face of the brand,
but the moment
you turn the spotlight on him,
he felt uncomfortable.
He he didn't like talking much,
he was very, very--
He was a man of few words.
Ami did all his networking.
She became friends very quickly
with a very tight circle
of rich wives in India,
and if you were selling diamonds,
that's the most important thing to do.
They really wanted to rise the ranks,
so they lived in Samudra Mahal.
It was a penthouse at Samudra Mahal.
SUBRAMANIAN: People who live
in that part of town, in that building,
are people of wealth and stature.
They live lavish lives,
they move in only the most
rarefied circles in Bombay and India.
These are all the mantras of arrival.
Around 2014, right around the time
that his business was clearly
and visibly starting to expand,
there started to emerge these signals
that all was not quite well
with the empire.
LALL: His stores in India
weren't driving very much profit.
Yes, the first few pieces
would fly off the shelves
after the champagne parties
and you would see a few footfalls
once the store opened,
but in the months that followed,
trade was very slow.
It was around that time
that you heard rumors in the business
about him borrowing very heavily
and you always discounted these rumors
because they were at odds
with what you were seeing.
When I interviewed him
for Fortune magazine,
I said, "The rumor is that you are being
funded by the mafia in the Middle East,
there's another rumor that suggests
some of the country's
largest industrialists are funding you,
and there's another rumor that says that
you've actually borrowed it from the banks
and maybe you're defaulting."
And he said,
"That's all, you know, speculation."
There's a lot of envy and
there's a lot of jealousy in any industry
when somebody's doing something
that is, uh, beyond the usual.
People wondered where the money came from,
but
you know, very quietly.
[LAUGHS]
Um, as long as he was spending and
you know,
the publications were benefiting,
it was fine, right?
Yeah.
Nirav Modi's business was diamonds,
and diamonds are strange type
of consumer item
because what they are worth
is often quite hard to work out.
One of the things that he did
was he would take diamonds
and inflate their values
by selling them through financing vehicles
called shell companies.
A shell company
is a dummy company overseas
with a dummy set of directors
that has some kind of notional connection
to your own company
in your own jurisdiction.
CRABTREE: Nirav Modi set up shell companies,
in the names of his children
or his close family members
around the world.
And he used those shell companies
to take diamonds which were worth
only a certain amount
and then gradually inflate their value.
So, a diamond
that he had bought for $50 million
would be sold on to another shell company
that he might own for $100 million
and then sold on again
for even more money.
Every time a gem moved
from one shell company to another,
its price would go up,
uh, its value would be inflated.
CRABTREE: Ultimately, you do this because
you can take the money for yourself.
If you now have a diamond
which is actually worth 50 million
but through financial chicanery,
you've made it worth 100 million,
you've got 50 million in profit
that you can just take out
for your own personal use,
and that was how he built
his financial empire,
that was how he lived a life
that was one of a luxurious A-list tycoon.
I think one way to explain
Nirav Modi's hunger for that kind of money
was this ambition
that he had to be a global figure.
Nirav came to me and said
that he thought we had reached a point
where it was possible
for us to expand internationally
and I said, "Yeah, we could
go for a launch in a big way."
What I was told, literally, was that,
"There are great plans,
there's a vision
for creating something really large.
I can't disclose much,
but there's lots planned for this brand."
LALL: Nirav's launch in New York
is done big bang style.
You have Donald Trump Jr. attending,
you have Hollywood, Bollywood,
all in attendance.
It got a lot of ink
in the sense that this was something
that had never been done.
In fact, in most circles,
in both business and jewelry,
people couldn't believe
that Modi was actually
going to launch a store in New York,
because it didn't just mean
that you were gonna spend money
on rent and salaries,
it also meant you were competing
with the best of the best
in your particular industry
in that part of the world
and you were going neck to neck
with the Bulgaris and the Cartiers
and the Harry Winstons of the world.
I recognize the dream of a man
who was willing to do just about
everything to realize that dream,
to make it international, to make it
outlive his lifetime.
[INAUDIBLE]
[SOFT MUSIC PLAYING]
He was going global and truly global -
actual gold-plated destinations.
He really picked the hot spots
and he wanted to have a big fancy store
in those hot spots.
As the company would grow,
perception of India would grow,
and I think, for me, the nicest thing
was I felt a sense of pride
you know, of a store being
on the streets of Manhattan,
of a store being in Hong Kong,
of a store being in London.
I was really proud of it.
KANTRA: I felt really happy because
the brand was very well received globally.
It was nice to open
Vogue magazine or Vanity Fair
and see pieces that--
that I had made and contributed to,
and, um, see that he was getting
red carpet exposure.
It was really gratifying you know?
BROWN: He was a man that had, you know,
had grand designs really in every way.
At one point, his financial officer
was talking in terms of stores
in their hundreds,
you know, almost as if this was some sort
of master plan for world domination.
Let's just start, first of all,
with those expansion plans
because pretty ambitious expansion plans -
a hundred stores by what, 2025 -
at a time when you might say
the world economy is feeling
a little bit uncertain,
but you've shrugged off that uncertainty.
Uh, women always buy diamonds,
they love diamond jewelry,
and men buy it for women,
so I think it's recession proof.
Do you ever sit up at night thinking,
you know,
"Really, a hundred stores by 2025,
is that a big gamble?"
We talked about you taking risks,
but it is a risk.
Absolutely, I mean, there's--
I always will have sleepless nights,
but, uh, we will move forward.
He was on a path
he was on a path,
you can't distract a man like that.
He had a purpose, he had a bigger purpose,
a purpose that was just,
I felt, bigger than
I felt the purpose
was bigger than a profit.
CRABTREE: By 2017, Nirav Modi had a fortune,
according to the Forbes list,
at nearly $2 billion.
It catapulted him into the serious
A-leagues of India's super rich
in a way that no jeweler
had ever done before.
MODI: I believe this is the beginning
of the journey.
OK, so, I don't think I'm halfway through
or at the end, this is just the beginning.
So, I think with teamwork,
with grit, with determination and belief,
belief in the divine.
By 2017, you know, Nirav Modi has already
been taking out Letters of Undertaking
for close to six and a half years.
He has been bribing, or so it's claimed,
two officials in the Brady House branch
of Punjab National Bank.
In the summer of 2017,
one of the officials retires.
In January 2018, six months later,
once again Nirav Modi's representatives
turn up at the bank
and they ask for more LOUs.
They are told that they have to provide
a certain kind of cash collateral
and they respond,
with extreme carelessness,
that they have never had to provide
this kind of collateral before.
The bank officials are puzzled
and that's when they slowly discover
the number of LOUs
that have been issued to Nirav Modi
without any kind of cash collateral.
The banking officials then went
and did some more research
in the back room
and discovered that there was actually
a back log of $1.8 billion.
That's, essentially, when the whole
house of cards comes falling down.
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.
It is by far the biggest fraud
in India's banking history.
More than 11,000 crores
syphoned off one of India's biggest banks,
the Punjab National Bank.
Now, India's second largest bank
has detected a $1.77 billion fraud
coming from just one single branch.
VERMA: We were preparing
for a Nirav Modi shoot
models had been locked,
stylists had been asked to start,
and I got a call from the same person
who had introduced me to Nirav
and she just said,
"Have you seen the news?"
Something about
a bank loan going wrong and
And she said, "Just wait, hold on,
we might not shoot this weekend."
Now, raids are taking place at the offices
of jeweler Nirav Modi,
who's really at the center
of this entire scandal.
Somebody called me and said,
"Is that your guy 'Nirav'
that I just heard about?"
And at first, I-- I didn't believe it.
I just thought, "This makes no sense."
REPORTER: So, a massive fraud
in the Punjab National Bank
KANTRA: That's how it happened.
Tax authorities walked in
and shut the business down one day,
and everybody was out of work
the next day.
[IN HINDI]
PARMESHWAR: I was there the day it shut down.
We were sent away after a half-day,
but were not told
why it was being shut down
or why we were going home.
We got to know later, there was some scam
with the Punjab National Bank
through the TV.
When the factory closed,
I didn't leave the house for a month.
To me, it felt like it must be
when a person has a heart attack.
That's what it felt like.
Nirav sir leaving meant
that our support had gone.
along with his family members,
which included his wife,
left the country
much before this FIR was filed--
JAMVWAL: Somebody like me
would never have guessed
that Nirav Modi would flee the country,
that he would become a fugitive.
Somebody may have tipped him off.
It was so carefully done
a few days before news hit
every headline in India.
He had flown the coup.
[DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYING]
REPORTER #2: Another chapter added
to the great Indian bank robbery.
So, the allegation against Nirav Modi
was basically of defrauding
Punjab National Bank
to the tune of $1.8 billion.
And it was only possibly with
the connivance of officials in the bank.
[INDISTINCT CHATTER]
SUBRAMANIAN: When the details
of the fraud first emerged,
there were two bank officials who
were named and taken in for questioning.
One is a deputy manager
named Gokulnath Shetty.
REPORTER #3: Gokulnath Shetty,
a former deputy manager
of the Punjab National Bank,
will be in CBI custody until March 3rd.
The CBI says the investigation
is continuing.
And the other is Manoj Kharat,
who is a clerk,
who was simply
a paper stamper in the bank.
[OVERLAPPING VOICES]
SUBRAMANIAN: It's been claimed that Nirav
Modi has been bribing these gentleman
for six and a half years.
[INDISTINCT OVERLAPPING VOICES]
[IN HINDI]
KHARAT: When they arrested me
even then, I didn't understand
what was going on.
I was in police custody for 14 days.
After that,
I was in jail for three months.
Being in jail, it was another hell
it was a terrifying place.
I wasn't made for it.
I am getting goosebumps
just thinking about it.
I could never do something like this
or even think about it.
I did the work, I'm not denying it,
but you need to look at the environment.
The document would come
to Gokulnath Shetty from the customer,
and then he would give it to me.
I did not have the power
to authorize anything in my role.
I didn't know what was going on.
I'd just done my work sincerely,
but I was set up.
I was set up.
I'm sorry. [SOBS]
REPORTER: The CBI has alerted Interpol
to arrest or inform them
if the Modi family,
which has left the country,
should be spotted abroad,
and their passports
have been suspended for four weeks.
We heard he was in Switzerland,
then we heard he was in Hong Kong.
We knew his wife
and kids were in New York.
He has syphoned off
billions of rupees from Indian banks,
public sector banks,
money belonging to the common citizen.
India Today is outside
Nirav Modi's house in Antwerp.
India Today has now learned exclusively
that Nirav Modi happens to be
in New York City.
[TELEPHONE RINGING]
Nobody was sure exactly where he had gone,
but the editor the magazine
came to me and said,
you know, would I look into this guy.
And I thought this
was a rather interesting story.
He's a fugitive, he's on the run,
but the questions remained unanswered,
at that point,
"Well, where exactly is he?
Uh, what is he doing now?"
And this eventually lead us to discover
that India's number one
fugitive from justice,
uh, was living in London,
carrying on business,
living in a luxury penthouse,
uh, right in the center of the West End.
You might almost say hiding in plain sight
without anybody actually having made
any really strenuous efforts to find him.
And through various processes,
we were able to there establish
that he had opened a business here,
where his business was,
and, through that, where he was living.
Once we'd established
where we thought he was,
we spent some time looking at both places
and establishing
that there was a pattern of movement.
And so, on the assigned day,
I stood outside the office,
and as Nirav Modi came out,
we turned and walked up Soho Street
towards Oxford Street
and I and a video camera person
were able to then
fall into step beside him.
Have you applied for political asylum?
Can you confirm that?
His initial reaction was one of,
was one of real shock.
Basically, he looked like a man
who had been shot.
I mean, he was quite taken aback by that.
I know this is embarrassing for you,
but it would be very helpful if you could
just answer one or two of my questions.
Sorry, no comment.
BROWN: You owe a lot of people
a lot of money, Mr. Modi.
- Sorry, no comment.
- BROWN: No comment?
VERMA: I saw the leather jacket he was wearing
and the shirt he was wearing.
It looked badass.
[CHUCKLES]
In a good way, like, you know,
like there's a certain edginess.
BROWN: How long do you intend
to stay in England?
Can you tell me how long
you intend to stay in England?
CRABTREE: India's super rich like London.
It's easy to get to,
everybody speaks English.
BROWN: You can never find a taxi
when you want one, that's the problem.
CRABTREE: There are lots of Indian's there.
- Would the bus be of any use to you?
- [INAUDIBLE]
CRABTREE: It's a home away from home.
London is also a center
of the world's, um,
in a sense, off-shore finance industry,
so if you need to have access
to good lawyers and good bankers,
uh, the kind of people
who can protect your empire,
then London is a very good place
to get all of those, eh,
all of those skills.
[SPEAKING IN HINDI]
of a flight risk
BROWN: Within a day or two
of the piece appearing,
an extradition notice had been served
on him by the Indian government
and so he was arrested.
And he's been in custody ever since.
[DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYING]
[MUSIC FADES OUT]
[IN HINDI] We never felt that Nirav sir
could do something like this,
that he'd take the money and run,
we never thought that,
because he was giving the poor a living.
He was like a God, if a God
helps his followers earn a living.
There is no one else to support me,
it's all down to me.
Now, the situation is such
that we can't provide for our children.
That's what our situation has become now.
PARMESHWAR: I pray every day
that our factory starts again
and Nirav Sir comes back.
Wherever he is, he should return,
and he should think about whether
the workers have to be paid or not.
He should pay the workers.
If he pays everyone,
then there will be more blessings
for Firestar to start again.
KHARAT: After this, my life has collapsed.
I am half dead.
[VOICE BREAKING]
I am from
a very common
a very common family.
[BREATH TREMBLING]
I had no one to ask for help.
only one dupe and only one victim,
which was Punjab National Bank
again and again.
The negligence on the part of the bank
to make these fraudulent loans means
that the state inevitably
has to step in to bail them out.
And that's money
that could be better spent on education
or roads or infrastructure or water.
It's a huge hit,
it's a hit because the taxpayer
has to bear the burden of corruption
within all these state-run banks.
CRABTREE: There's a very clear double standard
in the way that we view corruption
in the world.
People look at countries like India
and say, "these countries are corrupt,"
but, actually, much of the very worst
corruption would not be possible
without seemingly respectable
international finance.
[DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYING]
CRABTREE: Somebody like Nirav Modi
needed international banks
in order to funnel his money abroad.
He needed international lawyers.
He needed, um, tax havens
in order to host his shell companies.
And so, the corruption, the grand
corruption you see in countries like India
works hand in glove with a different and
much more anonymous form of corruption,
which is entirely created
in rich countries like Britain
or Switzerland and America.
KANTRA: I always saw Nirav
as this guy who had a vision.
His behavior with me was always correct.
I-- I had never experienced a moment
where I questioned his integrity.
ZAKARIA: Nirav Modi is a four-letter word.
He's the guy who got away
and it's the governments honor
to get him back.
He's become the symbol of corrupt India.
It's now a matter of national pride
to see him in an Indian jail, you know.
[DRAMATIC MUSIC CONTINUES]
VERMA: I feel like the brand
should still be around.
I really do.
I feel like the brand and the jewelry
and what it was doing
was close to my heart.
Yeah, but I feel like he's a fighter.
I think anything that happens to him,
he'll seek inspiration in it.
[DRAMATIC MUSIC CONTINUES]
[MUSIC FADES OUT]
[THEME MUSIC PLAYING]