[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.
[man 2 in Hindi] 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 in English] 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]
[in English] Nirav had, sort of, 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.
[Shah in Hindi] 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".
[in English] The polishing of diamonds 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...
2008.
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?
[in English] The details 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.
[Parmeshwar in Hindi] 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.
[reporter 1 in English] Nirav Modi, 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]
[Kharat in Hindi] 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.
[in English] 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]
[in English] Eh, he's too much 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.
[Subramanian in English] There was 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]