Vijay Mallya: Scapegoat, victim or the villain? 

The key to businessman Vijay Mallya’s extradition to India from Britain perhaps no longer lies in London. On Tuesday, September 18, the Bangalore High Court began hearing his plea to sell off, under its supervision, assets deposited by him and estimated to be worth Rs 13,900 crore, and thereby repay Indian banks owed money by his now defunct Kingfisher Airline (KFA).

If the high court accepts this application and proceeds with an auction of the assets – which in India’s snail-paced system is unlikely to be executed in a hurry – the charge made in the extradition case by the Indian government that he had no intention to return the money could become redundant.

Kingfisher Airline, riding on the extensively recognised beer brand, was launched by Mallya in 2005. It aspired to be a quality service and did undoubtedly achieve this goal. By 2011, it had carved out a second largest market share in the Indian air travel industry.

However, from the very beginning, the airline suffered bleeding losses. The acquisition of Air Deccan made it worse. Attempting to accomplish too much too soon and gross mismanagement were the causes of failure of an initiative which otherwise started with considerable promise and set high standards of hospitality. Kingfisher’s licence was suspended by the Directorate Generate of Civil Aviation in India in October 2012. This action was notably taken by the Congress-led government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

PIYUSH GOYAL’S RANT

The truth has never been important to the RSS and BJP. Therefore, they indulge in manufacturing convenient truth to mislead unsuspecting Indians.

Piyush Goyal, Railway Minister in the government of Narendra Modi, has nothing to do with civil aviation. Yet, he was wheeled out to badmouth Singh. He expressed outrage that in 2010 the Singh government was exploring restructuring KFA. Is it not the duty of an administration to save jobs when hundreds of direct and thousands of indirect workers were on the verge of retrenchment? KFA, Goyal forgot to highlight, was at that time the biggest employer among airlines in the private sector.

The RSS-BJP regime also leaked a portion of a letter purportedly written by Mallya to Singh. If your conscience is clean – which Modi’s doesn’t appear to be – and a big businessman who employs thousands of people and who is till then not declared either a defaulter or fugitive from justice approaches a Prime Minister, the head of government would be irresponsible to completely ignore the matter.

So, Singh did what a correct Prime Minister would render in a democracy and a systematic government – refer the plea for examination by his officials. Far from being a “thank you” note – as the RSS-BJP have made it out to be – Mallya’s letter is a complaint, stating “we have not received any relief thus far”. He goes on to say, “I am once again appealing for your kind and urgent intervention” and “I would be most grateful for your immediate intervention and relief as requested”.

Clearly, the Singh government after due scrutiny did not deem it appropriate to intervene. Thus, KFA was delicensed by it soon after. Who did Modi consult before awarding a gigantic, high technology defence deal to an inexperienced Anil Ambani? Which authorised aide, cabinet committee, department or ministry was it that did due diligence, based on which Modi favoured Ambani at the expense of the tried-and-tested HAL?

Since Mallya, unlike most other Indian businessmen, provided personal guarantees for loans secured from a consortium of Indian banks, he consequently became liable for their repayment. With the banks snapping at his heels, Mallya took advantage of his Non-resident Indian (NRI) status and the leave of indefinite stay granted to him by Britain in the 1990s to relocate to London.

After he gave the slip to the government, Modi and his toadies, left red-faced, painted him as a poster boy of fraud and money laundering and pursued his extradition from the UK with an unprecedented aggression and propaganda. They were desperate for success, so as to use it in the 2019 general election campaign.

MODI, JAITLEY’S EFFORTS TO INFLUENCE BRITISH COURT & GOVT

A judicial process in a first world country may move surely, but not with unseemly speed dictated by the executive, let alone a foreign government. More than once Modi himself raised the matter with his British counterpart Theresa May. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley took it up with opposite number Philip Hammond.

What Jaitley overlooked to disclose was the fact that Mallya, availing of his access as a Rajya Sabha MP of JDS, met him in apparently the central hall of Parliament and informed him of his impending departure from the country. Jaitley at first denied such a meeting had taken place. He then said he had been accosted in the corridor and described Mallya as a bluffer in reference to him offering to settle his dues.

If you have nothing to conceal, why should you as Finance Minister be ashamed to declare that a businessman owing large sums of money to public sector banks – which his ministry presides over – met you? Secondly, if he told you he was soon leaving Indian shores, alerting concerned authorities would have been in consonance with the ferocious attempt to drag him back that has followed. Last but not the least, Mallya was not deemed criminal enough to warrant stopping at emigration – as compared to just reporting his movement. He had, in fact, continued to be a frequent international traveller even after KFA went under and the noose began to tighten around him.

A rattled RSS-BJP’s attempt to defend Jaitley by diverting attention from him was testimony to the extent fascists can venture to fabricate.

Sambit Patra, a BJP spokesman, and Ravi Shankar Prasad, Minister of Law and IT in the Modi cabinet, ridiculously suggested Congress’ Gandhi family were the actual owners of KFA. Repeated requests to Mallya to respond to this assertion drew a blank. He probably thinks it’s beneath his dignity to reply to such trash.

BJP has forgotten that its Karnataka MPs happily took free rides week in and week out on Mallya’s plush executive jet between Delhi and Bangalore when Parliament was in session.

WHEELS OF JUSTICE

The saga of Mallya’s possible arrest and 18-month court proceedings have been as much a trial by media as by a British magistrate – with incorrect information being constantly planted by Modi’s lackeys to portray a picture of Mallya imminently returning to India in handcuffs. There is, realistically, no prospect of this happening in the near future.

Emma Arbuthnot, the chief magistrate of Westminster Magistrates’ Court, who heard the extradition case, has tentatively set December 10 as the date of her judgment. Even if the verdict goes in the Indian government’s favour, there are two stages of appeals in higher courts to be straddled before there’s any closure in the matter. The British Home Secretary would then presumably be the final arbiter, since Britain is scheduled to exit the European Union by the end of March 2019. In the event, Brexit is postponed or scrapped, Mallya will have the right to approach the European Court of Justice.

Whether Mallya has been bluffing – and he also earlier released a letter written to Narendra Modi on 15 April 2016– or not, has there been a serious effort on the part of the present government to pin him down? There is, of course, a gulf between what Mallya is claiming he owes the banks and the figure cited by them. The former feels his exposure is around Rs 5,500 crore; the banks insist he is liable in excess of Rs 9,000 crore, inclusive of interest charges, penalties and surcharges.

Even if one accepts the latter, recovering the debt is held up, because while the banks want their money back, the Central Bureau of Investigation and Enforcement Directorate’s priority is to put Mallya behind bars.

Funnily, while the megaphone message from Modi is different – and bought hook, line and sinker by a section of Indian media – the demand for Mallya’s extradition has merely to do with a loan of Rs 750 crore taken by KFA from IDBI Bank. He was accused of colluding with senior executives of the bank to obtain the facility and utilising the funds for unauthorised purposes. Both alleged violations, incidentally, have to fall foul of British law for a court in the UK to even consider the application.

Mallya’s formidable barrister Clare Montgomery maintained in her closing submissions on 12 September there was “no evidence” against her client and that the prosecution case was “utterly unfounded”.

The Crown Prosecution Service barrister Mark Summers, appearing for the Indian government, hit back by insisting there was a “prima facie case to be answered”. Arbuthnot commented the “Government (of India) shifted its ground” in course of the hearings.

It is another matter that prison conditions in India do not meet internationally accepted levels and that India is not a signatory to the United Nations Convention against Torture. Such factors have influenced English judges in the past to reject Indian requests for extradition.

Arbuthnot did not disclose what she thought of the standards at Mumbai’s Arthur Road prison based on a video of a barrack sent to her. Montgomery reacted to the pictures by saying there was an indication of a “hasty clean-up job” and that there had been a “new lavatory put in”. The Modi government is prepared to extend privileged treatment to Mallya, while other prisoners rot, to please a British Court.

Mallya’s flashy and flamboyant lifestyle, while not paying salaries to KFA employees, has been a major cause of public sentiment turning against him. Indeed, this has been his undoing. But it is a moot point that if the BJP government was so serious about booking him, then why was he allowed to escape with the seeming knowledge of the Finance Minister?