New Delhi, March 10: A political slugfest erupted Thursday over liquor baron Vijay Mallya leaving India in the middle of a massive loan default probe with Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi accusing the NDA government of “helping” him, a charge rejected by finance minister Arun Jaitley, who raked up the Bofors case to remind him of Ottavio Quattrocchi’s escape during Congress rule.
As the controversy surrounding the beleaguered businessman’s departure figured both inside and outside Parliament, Congress leader and Leader of Opposition Ghulam Nabi Azad raised the matter in Rajya Sabha and accused the NDA government of “criminal conspiracy” in allowing Mallya to fly out of the country. Mallya left March 2.
When the issue was raised in Lok Sabha, junior parliamentary affairs minister Rajiv Pratap Rudy asserted Mallya is “no saint for us” and that he has “not been given a single penny” by the NDA
government.
Outside Parliament, a combative Rahul asked how the government allowed Mallya, who owes over `9,000 crore to banks, to leave the country and said Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Jaitley have failed to answer this question in their speeches.
The Congress vice-president attacked the government, saying the entire country is questioning why it was “helping” people like Mallya by allowing him to escape and not fulfilling its promises made to the people for bringing back black money and “giving `15 lakh into every person’s bank account”.
He also hit out at the Modi government for bringing the “Fair and Lovely” tax amnesty scheme, saying it only helped thieves, black marketers and drug mafia to convert their black money into white.
“We simply asked that someone who stole `9,000 crore from the country, how did he run away from the country. How did you allow him to escape? This is the simple question and we neither got a reply to this from Modiji nor from Jaitleyji. The question is why did your government allow him to run away from the country,” he told reporters. PTI
