New Delhi: Amid efforts by the government to extradite liquor baron Vijay Mallya from UK and recover crores of unpaid dues, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Wednesday said the government is mulling to draft a law to confiscate the assets of ‘big time offenders’ who flee the country to escape the law.
"There have been instances of big time offenders fleeing the country to escape law. The government is considering legislative changes, and new law to confiscate assets of such persons," Jaitley said while presenting the Union Budget 2017-18 in Parliament.
On Tuesday, the Central Bureau of Investigation started the process to extradite the business tycoon Vijay Mallya from UK by filing an affidavit in court, saying that he is a wanted criminal.
The affidavit will be submitted to the ministry of external affairs, which will then approach its UK counterparts for the extradition.
Mallya, who has spent last 10 months in UK, evaded the law for almost a year.
The move comes a week after CBI filed a charge sheet against the liquor baron in the Rs 900 crore IDBI loans case before a special court in Mumbai, alleging that Kingfisher Airlines allegedly diverted Rs 263 crore from Rs 900 crore IDBI loan for "personal use".
The agency has named nine people whom it arrested on Monday in the case —— former chairman of IDBI Yogesh Aggarwal, former CFO of the Kingfisher Airlines A Raghunathan, IDBI executives O V Bundellu, S K V Srinivasan, R S Sridhar, B K Batra, and Kingfisher executives Shailesh Borke, A C Shah and Amit Nadkarni —— in the charge sheet, leaving out Mallya, as he is yet to be arrested.
It has slapped IPC sections related to criminal conspiracy, cheating and provisions of Prevention of Corruption Act on the accused. CBI sources said the agency has kept its probe open in the issue of suspected quid pro quo by Mallya and executives of Kingfisher Airlines to expedite the loan process.
They said that in this probe, it has come to light that about Rs 263 crore from Rs 900 crore loan was diverted for "personal" use against norms and regulations. Nine persons, including former executives of Kingfisher Airlines and IDBI officials, were arrested "as the agency fears they might have influenced the witnesses", the sources said.
Mallya travelled abroad in October and returned in November. He made two trips in the first and the last week of December and another in January 2016, besides the recent trip reportedly to London on March 2.
