Highlights
- A United Kingdom court today ordered the extradition of fugitive liquor baron Vijay Mallya.
- Mallya faces a case of loan default to the tune of Rs 9,000 crore besides allegations of money laundering.
- Mallya had contested his extradition on the grounds that the case against him is "politically motivated" .
- A high security cell has been kept ready at the jail located in central Mumbai.
In what may appear to be a big win for the NDA government, the United Kingdom court today ordered the extradition of Vijay Mallya. Mallya's extradition notice will now be sent to UK Home Secretary. Vijay Mallya now has 14 days to appeal against the order.
Mallya faces a case of loan default to the tune of Rs 9,000 crore besides allegations of money laundering and diversion of loan funds for purposes other than they were meant for. He was in self-imposed exile in London. He left for the the United Kingdom in March 2016 taking advantage of the the dilution in the CBI lookout notice against him.
Mallya was arrested twice and bailed out in London in extradition and money-laundering cases filed by the CBI and the Enforcement Directorate (ED) which has accused him of conspiring to defraud banks through a Rs 9,100 crore loan to Kingfisher AirlinesNSE -11.11 % Ltd., a premium airline he founded in 2005 and shut down seven years later. He owes Rs 6,203 crore to 12 banks and the ED has attached his properties worth Rs 8,000 crore. Indian banks got Mallya's asset frozen through a UK court last year. The asset freeze order had forced Mallya to live on 5,000 pounds a week, but his allowance was increased to roughly 20,000 pounds a week this year.
Mallya had contested his extradition on the grounds that the case against him is "politically motivated" and the loans he has been accused of defrauding on were sought to keep his now-defunct airline afloat. "I did not borrow a single rupee. The borrower was Kingfisher Airlines. Money was lost due to a genuine and sad business failure. Being held as guarantor is not fraud," he said in his recent Twitter post on the issue. "I have offered to repay 100 per cent of the principal amount to them. Please take it," the flamboyant businessman tweeted earlier. While dismissing that his intervention has anything to do with the extradition case, it came just days before Judge Emma Arbuthnot is expected to present her ruling in the case. The trial, which opened at the Magistrates' Court on December 4 last year, has gone through a series of hearings beyond the initial seven days earmarked for it.
It opened with the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) team, led by Mark Summers, laying out the Indian government's prima facie case of fraud and money laundering against Mallya. Summers sought to establish a "blueprint of dishonesty" against the businessman and that there are no bars to his extradition on human rights grounds.
Mallya's defence team, led by Clare Montgomery, deposed a series of experts in an attempt to prove that the erstwhile Kingfisher Airlines' alleged default of bank loans was the result of business failure rather than "dishonest" and "fraudulent" activity by its owner. The court was also told that a consortium of Indian banks, led by the State Bank of India (SBI), rejected an offer by the liquor baron in early 2016 to pay back nearly 80 per cent of the principal loan amount owed to them.
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