Eight years is a long time to wait for a hearing date, and on Tuesday, a Mumbai special court decided it had waited long enough. Special judge Subhash K. Karhale refused to grant Mehul Choksi's lawyer any further adjournment in the Enforcement Directorate's plea to declare the diamond trader a fugitive economic offender, closed arguments, and reserved the matter for orders. The Free Press Journal reported that the order is likely to come next week.

The ED first moved this application back in July 2018, seeking to have both Choksi and his nephew Nirav Modi declared fugitives under the Fugitive Economic Offenders Act, a law that lets the agency go after properties linked to an accused even when those assets sit overseas. Modi's case moved. He was declared a fugitive and the process to confiscate his properties is already underway, according to the report. Choksi's plea just sat there, adjournment after adjournment, for the better part of a decade.

On Tuesday, Choksi's lawyer tried for one more. His argument: Choksi is lodged in Antwerp Prison in Belgium and can't be reached telephonically for instructions. ED counsel Kavita Patil opposed the request, and the court sided with her.

Judge Karhale wasn't in the mood to hear it. "This being a criminal miscellaneous application cannot be kept pending for further years together when about 7-8 years are already lapsed," he said, according to the report. He went further, noting that the case had already been argued before his predecessor and that Choksi had filed "many applications" over the years without ever getting to the actual arguments. The conduct, he said, of staying abroad since 2018 and avoiding the court "clearly indicates that he wants to prolong the matter when it is raised for hearing."

Choksi has been in Belgian custody since his arrest on April 12 last year, picked up on an extradition request from Indian agencies over his alleged role in the Punjab National Bank fraud, the scam built on forged letters of understanding that blew a hole in PNB's books. He left India on January 2, 2018, telling people it was for medical treatment. He never came back. The CBI registered its case against him and Modi that February, and the ED's money laundering probe followed from there.

Extradition proceedings against Choksi have dragged through Belgian courts for years, running parallel to whatever India's own system decides to do with him. A fugitive economic offender order in Mumbai wouldn't bring him home by itself. It would open the door to confiscating assets tied to him, the same route already being used against Modi.

For now, everyone's watching the calendar. The order is expected next week, eight years after the ED first asked for it.