LONDON: Fugitive diamond merchant Mehul Choksi is suing the Indian govt and five other people in the London high court for orchestrating what he refers to as his “kidnapping” from Antigua in 2021 in an alleged honeytrap plot.
Choksi has claimed in the preliminary hearing that five people working for R&AW kidnapped him in Antigua and smuggled him on a yacht to Dominica in a plot masterminded by the Indian state in order to extradite him to India to face charges in the Rs 13,500 Punjab National Bank scam.
Antigua police named Gurdip Bath, Barbara Jarabik, Gurmit Singh, Gurjit Singh Bhandal and Leslie Farrow-Guy as the five suspects, mostly UK-based, in the kidnapping. They are all being sued by Choksi alongside the Indian govt. They all deny the charges.
The court documents were served on the ministry of external affairs by the British high commission in New Delhi.
Edward Fitzgerald KC, representing Choksi (66), told Justice Freedman on Monday that Choksi was filing a civil suit against the Indian govt for allegedly ordering Choksi to be kidnapped on May 21, 2021 and smuggled by yacht to Dominica.
India denies any involvement, argues it is protected by state immunity and that the UK courts do not have jurisdiction for this case.
Harish Salve KC, representing India’s govt, said: “There is no evidence of India having anything to do with the alleged events. The claimant’s account is rife with non sequiturs and unsupported assumptions. Those accused seem a rather unlikely band of state-sponsored conspirators.”
Choksi is currently in jail in Belgium where he is fighting extradition proceedings brought by India.
Choksi first met Barbara Jarabik, a Hungarian luxury goods expert, in Antigua in Aug 2020. In May 2021 she is alleged to have asked him to visit the apartment she had rented in Jolly Harbour.
A group of men of Indian origin burst into the apartment and told Choksi he was “being detained to be interrogated by Indian agencies”, Fitzgerald told the court, London’s Times newspaper reported.
Choksi alleges that the men told him they worked for R&AW and beat him up, left him unconscious, and tied him to a wheelchair on the yacht to Dominica to extort a false confession from him and implicate the Congress party.
“The evidence points inevitably to India being behind this — they had the motivation, they had the resources,” Fitzgerald told the court, the Daily Telegraph reported.
Choksi denies the charges against him. Thenext hearing is expected in September.