Vijay Mallya gets three weeks’ time to file his reply on ED’s plea seeking fugitive offender's tag for him

A special court in Mumbai on Monday allowed liquor baron Vijay Mallya to file his reply on the Enforcement Directorate's application, seeking to declare him a fugitive economic offender under the new Fugitive Economic Offenders Act, 2018.

The special court gave Mallya three weeks’ time to file his reply on the ED’s application. He will now have to file the reply by September 24 and after that, the court will decide the future course of hearing on the ED’s plea.

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Earlier in June, the ED had moved to a special court in Mumbai seeking fugitive economic offender tag for Mallya under the recently promulgated Fugitive Economic Offenders Ordinance, which will allow the agency powers to confiscate his assets.

Sixty-two-year-old Mallya, the former boss of now-grounded Kingfisher airlines, is wanted in India for defaulting loans of state-run banks worth around 9,000 crore. He had fled the country on March 2, 2016, the very day when the banks had moved the Debt Recovery Tribunal (DRT).

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Currently, he is residing in the UK and the Indian government is making all the possible efforts for Mallya's extradition before 2019 Lok Sabha elections. He was even arrested in 2017 on an extradition warrant by the UK police. However, he got the bail soon after his arrest.