India’s finance minister Arun Jaitley on Wednesday (12) has rejected the claims of fugitive liquor baron, accused in numerous financial fraud cases – Vijay Mallya that having been met him before moving to London in 2016.
The minister said that he never gave him an appointment after becoming a minister in 2014.
Describing Mallya’s offer to settle overdue loans of over £958.79 million to his dysfunctioned Kingfisher Airline as “bluff offers”, Jaitley added that he did not received the papers Mallya was carrying during a brief meeting.
“Since he was a MP and he occasionally attended the House, he misused that privilege on one occasion while I was walking out of the House to go to my room. He paced up to catch up with me and while walking uttered a sentence that ‘I am making an offer of settlement’. Having been fully briefed about his earlier ‘bluff offers’, without allowing him to proceed with the conversation, I curtly told him ‘there was no point talking to me and he must make offers to his bankers,” the minister said in his Facebook blog.
“I did not even receive the papers that he was holding in his hand. Besides this one sentence exchange where he misused his privilege as a Rajya Sabha member, in order to further his commercial interest as a bank debtor, there is no question of my having ever given him an appointment to meet me,” the minister added.
Finance minister’s response came in the wake of Mallya’s statement claiming after a court hearing in London that he was “tipped off” to move out of the country.
“I left because I had a scheduled meeting in Geneva. I met the finance minister before I left, repeated my offer to settle with the banks. That is the truth,” Jaitley told journalists in London.
Mallya, however, did not reveal who “tipped him off” to move out of the country.
“King of Good Times”, Vijaya Mallya (62), who is fighting number of legal cases in the UK and India over fraud and money-laundering allegations as well as an extradition to India.
