It’s not time yet to say the goose is being cooked for resourceful Vijay Mallya. The once-flamboyant liquor baron turned aviation mogul who nosedived his way into debts, fled India, and then huddled himself to a fugitive status in the United Kingdom is back in the news.
The latest on him is that the UK government has consented, in principle, to a request from the Indian government to extradite him back to his base in India. The government’s plea to UK followed a court issued order to get back the liquor baron to the country in a money laundering case — one among the many cases he’s facing here.
It would be interesting to watch how this case would proceed from now on. And also if he, in reality, does arrive in India or flees from the UK before the formalities are done.
What could come to be of help to India is an existing India-UK mutual legal assistance treaty, under which both the countries are obliged to deport individuals from the respective countries if and when a request to that effect is made.
India has extradition treaties with some other countries as well, including the recent one with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) as also Saudi Arabia, which are helping get back many Indians involved in terrorist activities from the Gulf region.
There have also been reports of attempts at taking help from the UAE to get the underworld don Dawood Ibrahim extradited to India from Pakistan, as much of his ill-gotten assets are parked in the UAE.
Mallya keeps hemming and hawing that he is more sinned against than sinning. He blames India’s faulty aviation policies that forced his company into hefty losses which sank his Kingfisher airline, leading up to his bankruptcy.
That by itself cannot be an excuse when it comes to default payments to banks, of hefty sums of course, while he has assets both in India and abroad. What is generally recognized is that the liquor baron is trying to wriggle himself out of situations by bluffing his way through excuses and using his political connections to escape the law.
How the Union Government is going to handle the cases is keenly watched, also as this is a case of a billionaire businessman parking his wealth abroad. Prime Minister Narendra Damodardass Modi’s promise during his 2014 Lok Sabha polls that he, as PM, would bring back all such wealth, still remains an empty promise. Even in the present case of Mallya, the government has finally acted now because it has been forced to do so when a court directed to get him.
Either there is lethargy on the part of the government to swiftly move against those who have parked their wealth abroad, or there are one too many loopholes in the Indian legal system that help such law-breakers to get away with their acts.
Mallya himself has boarded a plane and exited the country when he owed Indian financial establishments as high as Rs 900 plus crore. As many as 60 such law violators from India, all big guns, are parking both themselves and their money in the UK itself, as shown in official records.
India’s requests at the political level to get many of them back so far had not met with favourable responses. This may primarily be the result of lack of enough exertion of pressure from this side.
We remember the recent visit of the UK Prime Minister, Theresa May, to India. Although she met a whole bunch of biggies in this country, including the Indian PM and President, none of them raised the issue of the various wanted law breakers taking refuge in her country.
Among these are also former cricket administrator and tax evader Lalit Modi, another fugitive who is playing hide and seek for a long time. Mallya only followed the footsteps of these men, as he discovered Indian law was weak and wanting in getting hold of fugitives who have access to international shores.
That these men enjoy extreme protection from the Modi government, a fact now known to all Indians, adds to their invincibility.
All these men having strong political connections, there is little surprise that the legal system remained in sleeping mode for a long time. It is imperative that the government woke up from its slumber and got back all of these men and retrieved the money they have stashed abroad without further delay. Display of legal impotency can only harm India further.