Mehul Choksi a proclaimed offender, claims Congress

NEW DELHI: Reiterating its accusation of political patronage for the PNB scam accused, Congress said on Monday a Chandigarh court had declared one of the accused, diamantaire Mehul Choksi, a proclaimed offender on August 4, 2017.
The party asked PM Narendra Modi and the finance minister to answer how Choksi, besides Nirav Modi, could leave the country "despite the court order".
Congress president Rahul Gandhi continued to tweet against the Modi regime, this time to allege the PM's silence on absconding businessmen - Choksi and Nirav, as also Lalit Modi and Vijay Mallya - "was screaming where his loyalty lay".The tweet came with the hashtag 'ModiRobsIndia'.
Congress spokesman Manish Tewari said a judicial magistrate in Chandigarh had declared Choksi a proclaimed offender in 2017.
He alleged the government was creating an impression of investigation through raids and unsourced claims to "divert attention from the key question of how Modi and Choksi were allowed to flee India despite a pile of complaints with the PMO as well as a Chandigarh court order". Tewari said the government was "peddling arbitrary figures of seizures from the accused to assuage public anger" and to keep the focus from the nub of the PNB scam.
"Given the doubts over the actions of the BJP leadership", the Congress spokesman said Modi should answer six questions about various issues of alleged corruption and crime under the BJP government. Tewari said Modi should give his views on reports that the turnover of the business run by BJP chief Amit Shah's son grew by 16,000 times in the year following Modi's election as PM.
He said the PM should also "break the government's silence and reveal the price of Rafale fighter jets being purchased from France".
Also, the party said, the PM should speak on what he thought about the death of judge B H Loya and the demand for an independent investigation into the death.