In what is being seen as an imminent indication of the deportation of one of the multiple economic offenders fleeing India in the last few years, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Thursday that Government of India was resorting to all channels to bring back economic offenders.
PM Modi, who was addressing a bankers’ symposium in Delhi, without naming any of the fugitives, said that these offenders should return to India. “In our attempt to bring back fugitives (economic offenders), we relied on policies and law and also used diplomatic channels. The message is very clear—return to your country. We are continuing these efforts,” the PM stated.
“When someone runs away with bank loans, it is discussed a lot. But when a daring government brings them back, nobody discusses it,” the PM said. The topic of the fleeing of economic offenders from India and the subsequent failure of the government to bring them back is often used by the Opposition parties, including Rahul Gandhi, to attack the government politically, which has, since coming to power in May 2014, put in a conscious effort to present itself as a “strong-assertive” government.
From Vijay Mallya, Nirav Modi, Mehul Choksi, Sandesara brothers, members of Iqbal Mirchi family, Zakir Naik, Nitish Thakur to Sanajy Bhandari, the list of economic offenders that the law enforcement agencies in India are trying to bring back from different countries, is long. The nodal agency in such cases is the Enforcement Directorate (ED), whose chief S.K. Mishra got another extension earlier this week by way of an ordinance passed by the government.
Agencies were in fact just hours away from deporting Choksi a few months ago, but last moment developments stalled their efforts. PM Modi added that more than Rs 5 lakh crore had been recovered from the offenders by his government while claiming that a lot of money was stuck with the defaulters during the Congress-led government’s term.
Mallya, who is holed up in London, had in 2019, become the first person to be declared a “fugitive economic offender” under the Fugitive Economic Offenders’ Act, 2018 by a special Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) Court in Mumbai. He was followed by Nirav Modi, one of the accused in the Rs 13,600 crore Punjab National Bank (PNB) fraud.
As per law, a Fugitive Economic Offender is a person against whom an arrest warrant has been issued in respect of a scheduled offence and who has left India so as to avoid criminal prosecution, or being abroad, refuses to return to India to face criminal prosecution. Once the person is declared a fugitive economic offender, the prosecuting agency has the powers to confiscate his properties.