Vijay Aggarwal, 57, Delhi-born and until this week best known as the lawyer of record for some of India’s most scrutinised economic-offence accused, is in a London jail, charged with four counts of sexual assault against two women. The Times of India, reporting under Naomi Canton’s byline on 20 August 2026, has laid out the charge sheet in some detail: three counts of sexual assault on one woman, contrary to Section 3 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003, arising from conduct alleged on 26 May and again on 9 August, at a serviced town house in Mayfair; a fourth count, of the same offence, relating to a separate incident. The address — 29 Brick Street, a 4,000-square-foot, four-storey, five-bedroom property that comes with a maid and a daily breakfast hamper and rents for roughly £2,000, about Rs 2.6 lakh, a night — is where Aggarwal had been staying.
His personal assistant, Manpreet Kaur, 41, was arrested alongside him on 11 August and charged on 13 August with two counts of intentionally encouraging or assisting the commission of a sexual assault offence, on the same two dates. The specific allegation is that she introduced two women to Aggarwal after posting a false job advertisement, inviting them to the Brick Street address under that pretext. Both appeared together at Westminster Magistrates’ Court on 13 August and were remanded in custody. The matter has since gone up to Southwark Crown Court, where a plea and trial preparation hearing is listed for 10 September. Two others arrested on 11 August in connection with the same investigation — a 23-year-old man and a 43-year-old woman — have been bailed pending further enquiries, a materially different posture from Aggarwal’s and Kaur’s continued custody. The two women who reported the assaults are, TOI notes, being supported by specialist Metropolitan Police officers.
This is now the confirmed position, superseding the vaguer reports of 18 and 19 August that spoke of an immigration-related detention and an unexplained quantity of cash. Those reports were not so much wrong as incomplete — they captured the fact of an arrest at a Mayfair property without capturing what it was actually for.
The Man Who Represented Them All
What makes the story land the way it does is less the charge itself than the résumé it interrupts. Aggarwal did not build his practice on minor briefs. Over roughly two decades at the Delhi Bar, he became the lawyer people in serious trouble with the Indian state specifically sought out — a specialist in economic offences whose client list reads, more or less, as a directory of the last fifteen years of Indian financial-crime jurisprudence.
He defended Shahid Balwa and Vinod Goenka, promoters of Swan Telecom, in the 2G spectrum-allocation trial, a case that ended in blanket acquittals from the special CBI court in December 2017. He represented Nirav Modi in the Punjab National Bank fraud proceedings — India Today interviewed him, by name, in that capacity in February 2018. He has appeared for accused persons in matters connected to the roughly Rs 2,000 crore IL&FS Financial Services case, and in proceedings involving Rajesh Aggarwal in the money-laundering matter linked to Misa Bharti. And, most visibly of all in the last eighteen months, he became the public face of Mehul Choksi’s defence — the lawyer who spoke to Indian television cameras after Choksi’s arrest in Antwerp in April 2025, and who has since argued before Belgian courts against Choksi’s extradition to India, citing his client’s health and the political character of the case.
There is an irony here that does not need much underlining, though it is worth stating plainly rather than leaving to insinuation: a lawyer whose entire professional identity was built on defending people the Indian state wanted to bring to account is now, in a foreign jurisdiction, the one facing a charge sheet himself. It is the kind of symmetry news desks reach for instinctively, and there is nothing wrong with noting it — so long as noting it is where it stops.
What the Symmetry Does Not Prove
Because it does not prove anything about the sexual assault charges themselves. A defence lawyer’s career choices — however colourful his clients, however many of them fled the country he represents — are not evidence bearing on whether he assaulted two women in a Mayfair town house in May and August of this year. Aggarwal has represented people accused of fraud, of siphoning bank funds, of gaming a telecom allocation process; some of those clients were acquitted, some remain fugitives, some are fighting extradition. None of that history speaks to the present charge, and treating it as though it does — as though a life spent defending the accused somehow made this outcome inevitable, or even likely — is a lazier form of reasoning than the story deserves. The charges against Aggarwal will be tested at Southwark Crown Court, on their own facts, starting with the 10 September hearing, and not in the court of professional biography.
What the coincidence of client and career is worth noting for is narrower: it explains why this particular arrest generated the volume of coverage it did, and why the earlier, thinner reports about immigration violations and unexplained cash spread as fast as they did. A well-known name attached to well-known clients travels. That is a fact about how this story moved through the Indian press in 48 hours, not a fact about what happened at 29 Brick Street.
Choksi’s Case, Running Separately
The extradition proceedings against Choksi in Antwerp continue on their own track, unaffected in any documented way by his lawyer’s arrest. Choksi remains in Belgian custody, held since April 2025 on an Indian request connected to the roughly Rs 13,500 crore PNB fraud in which he is accused alongside his nephew Nirav Modi — an allegation he denies. He fled India in January 2018, before the fraud surfaced publicly, and later acquired citizenship in Antigua and Barbuda. Whether Aggarwal’s arrest has any bearing on his continued conduct of Choksi’s defence — whether, practically, someone else now has to step in — is not something the reporting so far addresses, and it would be premature to guess.
What Comes Next
The next fixed date on the public record is 10 September 2026, when Aggarwal and Kaur are due at Southwark Crown Court for a plea and trial preparation hearing. Until then, what exists is a formal charge, laid out with more specificity than the initial reports managed, but a charge all the same — not a finding, and not a verdict. The distinction is not a technicality. It is the entire difference between what is known and what is merely, for now, alleged.
Disclaimer: Vijay Aggarwal and Manpreet Kaur have been charged, not convicted, and are entitled to the presumption of innocence under law. This account reflects charges as reported by The Times of India (Naomi Canton, 20 August 2026) and should be read strictly as a record of the criminal charging process, not as a finding of fact regarding guilt.