On February 14, everyone is celebrating Valentine’s Day but India’s one of the biggest banks revealed $1.7 billion fraud allegedly by one of the country’s richest men. He deals in pearls and diamonds. Shares on the lender, Punjab National Bank (PNB) fell on the news, dragging down other lenders when it said the scam may extend to multiple banks.

In its complaint to the federal investigation agency, the Central Bureau of Investigation, PNB alleged that the fraud was led by Nirav Modi, a jeweler. He is regular on the pages of the world’s leading international financial dailies and fashion magazines, advertising for stores on glamorous high streets. Nirav Modi was featured on the Forbes list of Indian billionaires of 2013 with No. 85.

Billboards with brand ambassador Priyanka Chopra are plastered all across India’s commercial capital. But, for some years now, life for the 47-year-old billionaire has been anything but glamorous. A year after appearing on the Forbes, Modi has been under the scanner of law enforcement agencies like the CBI and Enforcement Directorate (ED) as well as the tax department for alleged illegal transactions and frauds.

PNB alleges that Modi worked with a former PNB employee, Gokulnath Shetty, who was posted at a PNB branch in Mumbai from where the fraud originated. Shetty was a deputy general manager in the foreign-exchange department looking after import payments.

PNB has alleged that the Modis and companies linked with them colluded with Shetty to pull off the heist. The bank claims they used fake PNB guarantees worth $1.8 billion to obtain loans from the overseas branches of Indian banks, claiming to need the cash to import pearls, according to documents made public.

In 2014, the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) called him out for alleged diversion of imported, duty-free, cut and polished diamonds and pearls to the domestic market. The DRI called it a violation of import-export norms. It came to light last month when representatives of Modi’s companies approached PNB for a fresh loan, PNB said in its complaint, the details of which have been made public.

By then, Shetty had retired and his successor declined to honor Modi’s request.”At this, the firms contested that they have been availing this facility in the past also but the branch records did not reveal details of any such facility,” PNB said in the complaint.

Coming to his personal life, Nirav Modi was born in India and raised in the Belgian city Antwerp, the diamond capital of the world. Growing up in the family of the diamond business, he used to be at the dinner table conversations at home. But this was not his first choice of profession.

Modi at 19 joined the family business of his maternal uncle at Gitanjali Gems Ltd. He was a drop out from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. His uncle Mehul Choksi is one among the four accused in the ongoing CBI investigation. Modi’s initial nine years at Gitanjali Gems laid the foundation for his own jewelry business. Modi’s tryst with jewelry design happened by chance, in 2009, when he was persuaded to design a pair of earrings for a friend.

Within no time, Modi became the first Indian to feature on the cover of a Christie’s auction catalog in 2010 for a Golconda diamond necklace that fetched $3.56 million at its auction in Hong Kong. Later, in October 2012, his Riviere Diamond Necklace was sold for $5.1 million at a Sotheby’s auction in Hong Kong.

In addition, many of India’s biggest business families have been buying diamonds from him for years. Modi is ranked 1,234 in Forbes’s world’s billionaires list for 2017, and 85 in India. According to the Forbes website, His financial worth is estimated at $1.73 billion through his jewelry design and retail businesses.