London court clears Lalit Modi in cheating case

A court in London has ruled that Lalit Modi, the founder of Indian Premier League (IPL), did not mislead the venture capitalist, Gurpreet Gill Maag and her husband Daniel into investing $1 million in his cancer treatment clinic.

A three-judge bench ruling, delivered on Tuesday, said “neither Mr nor Mrs Maag seemed to me at all gullible and despite Mr Lalit Modi’s past achievements and connections, I would expect them to have taken some of [Mr Modi’s] possible boasts and ‘puffs’ (as I did) with at least a pinch of salt.”

The Maags had accused Lalit Modi of ‘deceiving’ them when they met in Dubai in 2018 to discuss investment in Ion Care, a cancer clinic. The Maags alleged Lalit Modi was economical with the truth about wealthy and well-known individuals agreeing to be ambassadors for the company.

A former Sikh model, Maag had in particular alleged that she was duped by Lalit Modi, into thinking that Royals and world leaders such as Prince Andrew, former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, Sheikh Nahyan bin Mubarak Al Nahyan, the Minister of Culture and Knowledge Development in the United Arab Emirates, and Dr Thaksin Shinawatra, a former Prime Minister of Thailand had all invested his cancer treatment company Ion Care. The court instead found that he merely presented her with a "vision" for the venture.

The Court of Appeal, with a panel of Justices Guy Newey, Rabinder Singh and Christopher Nugee, rejected a request by Maag to overturn an earlier high court ruling that Lalit Modi made incorrect representations to her about the center he intended to found. Instead, the panel upheld the finding that Lalit Modi's investment pitch to the Maags was "aspirational" rather than intended to show the current state of the business.

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