Former UK Home Secretary Priti Patel has expressed anger and frustration at the lengthy legal delays to bring fugitive diamond merchant Nirav Modi home. In an interview with The Daily Telegraph’s podcast show The Diamond King she said she is ‘appalled and horrified’ that the fraud suspect is being kept in the UK despite a British government order for him to be sent to India in April 2021.
Patel, who was home secretary from 2019 to 2022, said the long-running legal battle around Modi had severely complicated the diplomatic and administrative negotiations between London and New Delhi. The Indian-born Conservative politician said the Indian government had a lot of leverage in bilateral negotiations and fought back aggressively against British proposals to take back thousands of illegal Indian migrants, visa overstayers and failed asylum seekers. She said New Delhi’s refusal to cooperate with repatriation flights came from deep frustration with the UK’s failure to rapidly return high-profile economic fugitives to face justice.
"I had a hell of a challenge getting them [India] to sign off on receiving failed asylum seekers... and I'm convinced it's because we had this high-profile case of Nirav Modi and we had another high-profile case at the time, and until they saw action and movement on those, guess what, they had some leverage over us," Patel added in the podcast interview. She said the authorities in New Delhi felt demoralized to work with British colleagues while the legal process was bogging down.
Nirav Modi is wanted in India for many high-stakes criminal proceedings - among them, the current alleged $2 billion Punjab National Bank (PNB) loan scam in which fraud and money laundering is alleged by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and Enforcement Directorate (ED). Other charges are interference with witnesses and evidence. For years Modi has fought his removal through endless rounds of High Court appeals on human rights grounds and secret political asylum claims.
Having exhausted his legal recourse in the UK judicial system and suffered setbacks at the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), Modi’s long-delayed extradition is increasingly viewed as imminent. Patel has called the situation a “flagrant abuse” of British legal structures and an insult to taxpayers, emphasizing that Modi belongs behind bars serving time in India where the alleged crimes were committed.
