Vijay Malya, a wanted businessman, was given a four-month prison term and fined Rs 2,000 by the Supreme Court on Monday for contempt in relation to proceedings brought after he failed to make payments due to lenders led by the State Bank of India.
The court ordered Mallya and his son Siddharth to repay the debt in the amount of $40 million plus 8% interest. If Mallya doesn’t make the payment, his possessions will be seized.
Mallya is out on bail in London, where he has been battling extradition to India since his 2017 arrest there. In 2017, the Supreme Court found him guilty of contempt of court for transferring $40 million to his kids and omitting to properly disclose his holdings.
He is charged with giving the loan to his family in 2015 against court orders not to. Justices U Lalit, S Ravindra Bhat, and PS Narasimha, sitting as a bench of the Supreme Court, declared that Mallya had shown no remorse and that the case called for the imposition of the proper sentence.
Mallya was given two weeks by the Supreme Court in February to attend in person or have a lawyer represent him in the contempt case.
In that month, the court agreed with senior attorney Jaideep Gupta’s claim that Mallya had been given his final chance to present his argument over the sentence’s length. Gupta is aiding the court in this matter.
In 2021, the court declared that it had waited “long enough” and couldn’t “wait any longer” for Mallya to be returned to India from the UK.
Mallya lost his money following a severe liquidity constraint at Kingfisher Airlines Ltd., the full-service airline he launched in 2005 and was forced to shut down seven years later. Mallya’s empire formerly included booze, a cricket franchise, and a Formula One team. In 2016, he flew from India to London.
Bengali