The Wire: New Delhi: Tuesday, July 31, 2018.
Want to
understand how exactly billionaire jeweller Nirav Modi managed to travel around
the world despite his passport being “cancelled”? Well, a Right to Information
query to the Ministry of External affairs will not yield any answers.
Ever since he
left India, Nirav Modi has reportedly been travelling through various
countries, even as his passport was under suspension and eventually cancelled.
In June, an
RTI query with multiple questions was submitted to the ministry to unravel the
mystery of Nirav’s international travel itinerary despite him being a fugitive.
The questions
were whether the MEA knew Nirav’s passport number, the date of its suspension,
details of his multiple passport booklets, including issuing authority, if he
held them. There were also queries about the route that Nirav Modi had
travelled to flee India, whether Indian passport can be used to trace a
person’s route and if the ministry had used this method. Lastly, MEA was asked
whether it was aware of Nirav Modi’s location in June.
There was an
answer only for the first of the eight questions – MEA agreed that it does know
the passport number of Nirav’s passport.
But for all other
queries about details of the passport, there was stonewalling. “The desired
information in the above-mentioned points cannot be provided to applicant
keeping it as an exemption under Section 8(1)(j) of the RTI Act 2005,” said the
MEA reply.
The mentioned
clause in the RTI act says:
(j)
information which relates to personal information the disclosure of which has
not relationship to any public activity or interest, or which would cause
unwarranted invasion of the privacy of the individual unless the Central Public
Information Officer or the State Public Information Officer or the appellate
authority, as the case may be, is satisfied that the larger public interest
justifies the disclosure of such information: Provided that the information,
which cannot be denied to the Parliament or a State Legislature shall not be
denied to any person.
The MEA was
also probably taking the support of a Delhi high court judgement of 2014 which
reversed an order of Central Information Commission. The high court had ruled
on a MEA petition that passport details cannot be disclosed to a third party
under the Right to Information as it violated privacy and could be misused.
However, out
of the queries on the passport of Nirav Modi, only some of them asked for
details of the travel document.
The RTI
question had also sought information about whether Nirav had “multiple
passports” as per media reports citing anonymous officials in investigative
agencies.
The MEA’s
reply dated July 18 had also used the RTI Act’s provision on protecting privacy
to answer the query about whether Nirav owned ‘multiple passports’.
This is
despite the fact that MEA had publicly announced 20 days earlier that Nirav did
not have more than one passport.
“The first is
that Nirav Modi was issued a fresh passport only after his previous passports
were physically cancelled. When I say physically cancelled it means that you
take the passport and you stamp it with “CANCELLED” remark. Number two, at no
stage did he have more than one valid passport in his possession,” said MEA
spokesperson Ravish Kumar at a weekly briefing on June 28.
On July 2,
Interpol made public a Red Corner notice for Nirav Modi, his brother and an
employee. According a PTI report, Interpol gave details to its 192 members of
five passports issued to Modi between May 2008 and 2017, which had been
cancelled but were still being used for travelling.
This is not
the first time that a government organisation has been less than transparent in
an RTI query about information related to Nirav Modi which was already in the
public sphere.
Under the RTI
act, the Enforcement Directorate had refused to disclose the total amount of
seized assets of Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi. However, the investigating agency
had earlier tweeted on March 24 that assets worth Rs 7,664 crore had been
attached in cases related to the Punjab National Bank scam.
Nirav Modi,
the founder of Nirav Modi Global Diamond Jewellery House, established in 2010,
is currently a wanted fugitive who absconded in early 2018 when the Central
Bureau of Investigation (CBI) started investigating a $2 billion fraud case
involving him and Indian banks.
The ED had
registered two cases of money laundering against the duo based on two first
information reports (FIR) filed by the CBI in January 2018.
The CBI had
alleged that Nirav and his uncle Mehul Choksi allegedly cheated Punjab National
Bank (PNB) in connivance with certain bank officials by fraudulently getting
Letters of Undertaking (LOUs) issued to their three firms without any
collateral and without following prescribed procedure, causing wrongful loss to
PNB.
While Nirav’s
location is not yet clear, it was confirmed that Choksi acquired citizenship in
Antigua and Barbuda last year.
Last week, a
PMLA court had summoned Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi to appear within six weeks
on a plea moved by ED to confiscate their assets worth Rs 3,500 crore and
declare them as fugitive offenders.
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