Bank Also Seeks To Attach Flats In Dubai, S’pore & A Motorboat
The Punjab National Bank (PNB) is not only keen on attaching all of diamantaire Nirav Modi’s assets—flats in Pune, Dubai, Singapore and Hong Kong, a motorboat, and Rs 5.5 crore worth of jewellery—but also his collection of 125 paintings of celebrated artists such as V S Gaitonde, M F Husain, K K Hebbar, Anjolie Ela Menon, Vishwanath Nageshkar, Nandalal Bose and Vivan Sundaram. The collection boasts a Rs 4 crore Raja Ravi Varma masterpiece titled ‘The maharajah of Travancore and his younger brother welcoming Richard Grenville in 1880’.
Modi flew out of India in January before the bank registered a case against him with the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).
Earlier this week, PNB launched a legal battle to recover Rs 7,000 crore from Modi and his companies, allegedly availed through “fraudulent letters of undertaking”. In a letter to the bank, Modi denied that the LOUs were fraudulent.
To secure its losses, PNB produced a list of Modi’s assets valued at Rs 3,402 crore before the debt recovery tribunal (DRT) to seek attachment orders. The bank had approached the DRT against Modi and 15 others, including his wife Ami, his brothers Neeshal and Nehal, his three children, his father Deepak Modi, and his companies—Stellar Diamonds, Solar Exports, Diamond R US, Firestar International, Firestar Diamond International and A N M Enterprises.
In his four PNB accounts, Modi collectively holds all of Rs 36 lakh. Two of these accounts have just Rs 5,000 and Rs 90,000, respectively, says the PNB application to the DRT.
The asset details were prepared by chartered accountants Sampat & Mehta in December 2017, says PNB.
The assets list includes 125 paintings, which art collectors would be ready to fight over. Besides Varma, it boasts Husain’s Rs 53 lakh ‘Veena player’ and his other works, a 1963 Hebbar oil on canvas, Om Soorya’s ‘Narcissus was he seeing his own images in the lake’, a Rs 4.6 lakh Surendran Nair lithograph ‘About growing wings’, Amit Ambalal’s ‘Fruits of Fear’, J Sultan Ali’s ‘Parmannu series’, including titles such as ‘Shatruta’ and ‘Adharma’, and Jayashree Chakravarty’s ‘Fortune Teller’.
Also on the list of assets are three flats in Dubai valued together at Rs 6.5 crore, and one each in Singapore and Hong Kong whose values are not mentioned. The value of flats in Worli’s Samudra Mahal, in Ami’s name, is not mentioned either. While the list mentions just Rs 8 lakh as “cash in hand”, investments in equity of A N M Enterprises and FIPL at cost are shown as Rs 2,815 crore, disclose the annexed asset details. There is a mention of land in Ahmednagar and Alibag too, a parking place at Prasad Chambers, and Rs 474 crore loans and advances.
DRT is yet to hear the PNB plea filed via law firm Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas.
