Nirav Modi : The man at the centre of PNB scam !!!

If he is not making Priyanka Chopra feel daddy’s pampered little girl, he is probably co-hosting a Michelin chef’s table for Bollywood and business A listers Vikas and Gayatri Oberoi, Aryama Sundaram, Pirojsha Godrej, VryaSwati Piramal and Sonam Kapoor with Massimo Bottura.

But for a man always at the centre of a glittering and effervescent universe, Nirav Modi is enviably taciturn. Even when he speaks, the Wharton school dropout turned hautest diamantiere with a weakness for Canali suits, Bentley cars, Francis Newton Souza canvases, is almost inaudible.

Not his eponymous jewellery label though.

Within a span of a decade, and emerging out of nowhere, it has blazed its trail across high streets of Madison Avenue or MGM Macau and Marina Bay Sands to emerge as the biggest luxury label to have ever come out of Asia. Till the law caught up with him.

PNB fraud: Two rogue employees, one famed jeweller, and Rs 11,300 crore vanishing into thin air

How did two employees try to fool a stodgy bank in the largest diamond house fraud that surfaced on Valentine’s Day, when thousands of pearls and gems change hands across the world? 

In raising funds and moving money out of Punjab National BankBSE -11.97 % (PNBBSE -11.97 %), the two employees of the state-owned lender directly used SWIFTBSE -1.22 % — the global financial messaging service used to move millions of dollars across borders every hour — and bypassed the core banking system (CBS) which processes daily banking transactions and posts updates. 

It was a ploy to avoid immediate detection: the SWIFT messages used to raise overseas credit were not readily available in PNB’s FINACLE software system as these were issued without entering into the bank’s CBS.