Loan defalter Vijay Mallya on Tuesday said that he is ready to settle all his dues with the banks and wants to return to India. According to him, he was ready to pay the dues earlier and had written a letter to PM Narendra Modi also but did not get cooperation from the government. Mallya said he wrote a letter to PM Modi and Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on April 15, 2016 but did not receive any reply. On Wednesday, he took to Twitter to inform that he had appealed Karnataka High Court seeking approval to sell his assets worth Rs 13,900 crore.
He also said he is not a fugitive and 'always had honest intentions' to repay his loans.
He informed that he and United Breweries Group (UBHL) have filed an application in the Karnataka High Court on June 22, 2018, setting out available assets of approximately Rs 13,900 crores. He said they have asked the court for permission to allow the sale of assets under judicial supervision and repay creditors, including the Public Sector Banks such amounts as may be directed and determined by the Court.
This comes after Mallya on Tuesday broke his silence over the controversy surrounding him of defaulting on bank loans to the tune of Rs 9000 crores, and said he had been falsely framed as the "poster boy of Bank default and a lightning rod of public anger".
Mallya also cried foul and said he is being falsely accused in chargesheets by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and Enforcement Directorate (ED). He wrote: "CBI and ED chargesheets specifically allege criminality with no intention to repay banks. Since 2016, I have been making efforts to settle. Now I have placed everything before the honourable Karnataka High Court. So where is the malafide? Are banks interested in repayment".
"I have become the Poster Boy of bank default and a lightning rod of public anger," he wrote in one of his letters to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He added, "The ED has also attached assets belonging to me, my Group Companies and companies owned and/or controlled by my family under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) currently valued at approximately Rs 13,900 crore, he said."
Reacting to fugitive Vijay Mallya’s letter, claiming that he wanted to pay back the bank loans, Minister of State (MoS) for Ministry of External Affairs, MJ Akbar, said on Tuesday said he could have done so in the years that have gone by. “If Vijay Mallya wanted to pay the banks, he had many years to do so,” Akbar said. Mallya broke his silence over the controversy surrounding him of defaulting on bank loans and claimed that even though he wanted to settle the bank loans, his offer was rejected twice.
The Central Bureau of Investigation and Directorate of Enforcement said that they are looking into the statements issued by Mallya on Twitter. “We would not like to comment for now,” CBI spokesperson Abhishek Dayal said.
Mallya escaped to Britain in 2016 and since then, the Modi government has been making efforts to extradite him. Banks are seeking to recover around Rs 9,900 crore from him and in 2017, he was arrested on an extradition warrant.
