Indian businessman Pramod Mittal was charged in Bosnia on Thursday with leading an organized crime group and abuse of power while head of the supervisory board and co-owner of a coking plant in the northeastern city of Lukavac.
Mittal, the younger brother of Indian steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, was accused of “running an organized crime group” that allegedly helped him siphon nearly 11 million euros ($12 million) from Global Ispat Koksna Industrija Lukavac (GIKIL). . He co-owned the plant near Tuzla, in north-eastern Bosnia, with the local government.
Other charges include illegally taking control of the metallurgical coke producer despite failing to invest 23 million euros, or more than half the amount it pledged to invest in 2003 in exchange for a 51 percent stake in the company.
Seven others, including two former Indian and five Bosnian company management, have been indicted alongside Mittal on charges including racketeering, corruption and abuse of power.
Mittal and the other two Indians, GIKIL’s former CEO Paramesh Bhattacharyya and a former member of its supervisory board, Razib Dash, were arrested in Bosnia in the summer of 2019. But they were released and left the country after agreeing to pay the fee. bail. of 1 million euros, in the case of Mittal, and 250,000 euros for the other two. All three remain outside of Bosnia.
In 2019, the Tuzla cantonal court ordered Mittal to also deposit almost 11 million euros for alleged damages to GIKIL.
In a statement announcing the indictment Thursday, the court said prosecutors had filed an application to revoke bail and order Mittal and the other Indian defendants re-arrested and returned to jail for repeated failure to appear for hearings. research in Tuzla.
It was not immediately clear if any of the accused had formally responded to the charges.
