Training his guns at Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley over the Rs12,700 crore Punjab National Bank (PNB) fraud involving fugitive diamantaires Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi, Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Monday alleged that Jaitley has been “silent” over this scam as he sought to “protect his lawyer daughter” whose law firm was reportedly paid a “retainer amount” by Gitanjali Gems Ltd, Choksi’s tainted firm, just before the scam came to light.

Firing salvos at Jaitley, Rahul tweeted, “It’s now revealed that our FM’s silence on the PNB SCAM was to protect his lawyer daughter, who was paid a large retainer by the accused just a month before the SCAM became public. When other law firms of the accused have been raided by the CBI, why not hers?”, adding the hashtag “#ModiRobsIndia”.

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The Congress chief also tagged an article by The Wire, a multimedia news portal, in this regard.

According to this article, the law firm owned by Jaitley’s daughter and son-in-law, Jaitley & Bakshi, was made a retainer by Geetanjali Gems barely a month before the PNB scam hit the national headlines.

However, the firm terminated their retainership and refunded the entire amount to the company after reports about the latter’s alleged involvement in the PNB scam surfaced.

Rahul was referring to a point made by the article that in the wake of the PNB scam, various law firms associated with the accused Nirav-Choksi companies have come under scanner and that CBI had in February raided the Mumbai office of Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas, which had taken up an assignment barely few weeks before the scam was exposed, as part of its investigations into the scam.

The Congress president has been gunning for Prime Minister Narendra Modi over the PNB scam since it became public by end of January, repeatedly questioning the PM’s “silence” over what is dubbed as the “country’s largest-ever banking fraud”.

PTI adds: The CBI on Monday questioned Ravi Shankar Gupta, the chief financial officer of Modi’s company Firestar Diamonds International Limited in Mumbai, who is accused in the agency FIR in connection with the case, an official said.