Mehul Choksi speaks for first time from Antwerp prison, calls allegations against him a ‘conspiracy’

LONDON: Fugitive diamond businessman Mehul Choksi has given an interview to an investigative “Daily Mail” podcast from prison in Antwerp, where he is fighting extradition to India, saying that all the allegations against him “are a conspiracy”.“It was the govt of India that wanted to make me a scapegoat. It was a conspiracy. It was banks misreporting internal figures in the systems for many years. There was nothing else in it. They wanted to place the blame. They set this up and they made the country collapse,” Choksi, who looked gaunt and frail, claimed to Mail reporters in the visitors’ room with armed guards and security cameras, in episode 5 of the series “Heists, Scams and Lies: The Billion Dollar Honey Trap”.Launched by the Mail’s Crime Desk this week, it explores his alleged $1.8 million Punjab National Bank fraud and his allegations of being kidnapped in Antigua in a “state-sanctioned honeytrap plot”.The Mail was not allowed to carry in dictaphones or pen and paper, but scribbled down what he said using crayons and paper from a kids’ colouring set they found inside the jail.He said he had had PTSD since his alleged kidnap in Antigua. “I have a lot of mental pressure and anxiety,” he said, adding he “sees the kidnappers all the time” in prison and “dreamt they are coming to get him”. He works in a mince factory inside the prison and his family come to see him most days and in the evenings he “does a lot of cooking”, he said.“I was kidnapped and brought from Antigua to Dominica and I was jailed. You can see I was forcibly brought. I do realise that to fight against the state is not easy. I am sure one day the real truth will come out and God will be kinder,” Choksi said, adding his story was “like a movie” and he trusted the justice system to free him.He said it was “horrible” his kidnappers, who he claims were agents for India, had walked free and he was locked up. The podcast tracks some of them down and they all deny the allegations. He also left the Mail’s questions about the PNB scam “largely unanswered”.You use AI every day. Now get your AI Quotient. Take the AIQ test.