A high-level multi-agency team of officers drawn from the Central Bureau of Investigation, Enforcement Directorate and National Investigation Agency will be flying off the United Kingdom soon to expedite the process of extradition of India’s most wanted fugitives, including defence dealer Sanjay Bhandari, diamond trader Nirav Modi and erstwhile Kingfisher Airlines promoter Vijay Mallya.

The team will also seek cooperation in the terror cases NIA has filed against Khalistani radicals who had vandalised the Indian High Commission building in London, said sources aware of the developments.

The team, headed by an officer from the Ministry of External Affairs, is expected to meet authorities in London to seek information on the assets and bank accounts fugitives held to accumulate the proceeds of crime committed in India, sources stated. The extraditing proceedings of fugitives like Modi, Bhandari and Mallya are at different legal stages in UK.

While Bhandari had left the country during the UPA regime, the remaining wanted absconders Modi and Mallya left the regime after the BJP government came to power.

In the case against defence dealer Bhandari, the ED recently named Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi in a chargesheet after investigating a land deal in Haryana that which wife of Robert Vadra and daughter of Congress leader Sonia Gandhi purchased between 2005 and 2006 from an agent also hired by accused CC Thampi, an NRI business. Her husband too figure in the same chargesheet but they have not been made accused in the case.

The ED came across the land purchases by the Vadra couple while probing the Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA) case against Thampi, who is a relative of Bhandari, in 2015. Both enjoyed a “long and thick relationship”.

The case will come up before a special court on January 29 as it has already taken cognizance of the chargesheet filed in the case.

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