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 The March 2 departure of Mallya has sparked uproar in parliament and
a firestorm in domestic media that pore over the lifestyle one of
India's brashest entrepreneurs. Questions center on how Mallya was
allowed to leave even after creditors of his failed Kingfisher
Airlines had appealed to the Supreme Court to ensure he stayed in
the country.
"I did not flee from India and neither am I an absconder,"
60-year-old Mallya said in a series of posts on Twitter. Mallya said
in his posts that he would comply with domestic laws.
India's financial crime-fighting agency, the Enforcement
Directorate, has summoned Mallya for questioning on March 18, a
senior agency official said later on Friday. A spokesman for
Mallya's holding company, UB Group, declined to comment on the
summons.
The self-styled "King of Good Times", who built his business around
Kingfisher beer and co-owns a Formula 1 racing team, explained to
his 5 million Twitter followers that he travels to and from India
frequently, saying he was the target of "a raging fire" media witch
hunt. (http://bit.ly/227cxke)
Mallya, also a member of parliament's upper house who was last seen
in the chamber on March 1, didn't disclose his current location in
the social media posts. Two people familiar with his travel
arrangements told Reuters Mallya flew first class to London on Jet
Airways Flight 9W-122 the next day.
Indian TV reporters said they had traced Mallya to the Hertfordshire
village of Tewin, north of London, where he is known to locals. The
businessman's luxury home, called "Ladywalk", cost 11.5 million
pounds ($16.4 million) when bought in July 2015, property records
show.
Security officials told Reuters that Mallya, a fixture in India's
society press pages who sports a goatee, an ear stud and a ponytail,
was the subject of a "lookout notice" - an official circular that
triggers an alert if the target seeks to leave India but does not
provide a legal basis to prevent departure.
No formal legal warrant was issued against him, even as creditors
sought to step up efforts to recover the $1.4 billion owed by
Kingfisher Airlines, which stopped flying in October 2012.
"What can we do? It was the banks' responsibility to file a criminal
case against him," said a senior home ministry official who declined
to be identified because he was not authorized to discuss the case
publicly. "We had no legal basis to stop him."
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MODI SKEWERED
India's attorney general, representing more than a dozen creditors,
told the Supreme Court only this Wednesday that the tycoon was no
longer in the country - a week after Mallya left - leaving New Delhi
red-faced over his departure.
Opposition politicians have skewered Prime Minister Narendra Modi
for presiding over a situation where Mallya was allowed to leave the
country, mocking Modi's election promise to bring back illicit
"black money" stashed abroad.
The government has hit back, saying Mallya piled up his debts under
the Congress administration ousted by Modi in the 2014 election.
Commentators say the high-profile case is symptomatic of weak
management at India's public sector banks - Mallya's lead creditor
is State Bank of India. While a bill to modernize India's bankruptcy
laws is now before parliament, the outdated legislation that is
currently in force leads debt litigation to drag on for years.
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley told parliament on Thursday that the
government had instructed banks to go "all out" in their efforts to
recover the money owed by Kingfisher, pointing to cases of "wilful
default bordering on fraud".
Banks ramped up their campaign to retrieve funds after Mallya quit
as chairman of spirits maker United Spirits , a unit of Diageo Plc,
last month. As part of that settlement, Diageo will pay Mallya $75
million over five years.
(Additional reporting by Rupam Jain and Tommy Wilkes in NEW DELHI,
Shivam Srivastava in BENGALURU and Richa Naidu in LONDON; Writing by
Sumeet Chatterjee; Editing by Kenneth Maxwell)
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