The chargesheet filed by the CBI against liquor baron Vijay Mallya has quoted a current Assistant General Manager of IDBI to establish that there was no credit rating before disbursing the first two loans of ₹150 crore and ₹200 crore to his M/s Kingfisher Airlines. Moreover, the charge sheet says, the third loan of ₹750 crore was also below the credit rating norm.
The voluminous CBI chargesheet, submitted in a Mumbai court on January 24 — a copy of which has been accessed by The Hindu — includes a list of witnesses, documents and statements of the bank officials. It also names several former IDBI officials.
The statement by a current Assistant General Manager reads, “M/s Kingfisher Airlines started operations in May 2005 as per the proposal dated October 7, 2009 by Shri B Dasgupta and had completed three years operations. However, it was not profitable and incurred operational losses of ₹811 crore in 2008 and ₹2757 crore in 2009. The net losses of the company during these three years were ₹189 crores and ₹1609 crores. Further, by its own admission, the company had deferred payments to creditors.”
The statement says, “As per the memorandum dated October 7, 2009 the sanction of Short Term Loan (SLT) of ₹150 crore was placed and sanctioned by the Credit Committee (CC) of the IDBI Bank. On November 4, 2009 a STL of ₹200 crore was placed and sanctioned before CMD (Chairman cum Managing Director) by the powers conferred on him, On November 23, 2009 Corporate Loan of ₹750 crore was placed before the CC and on November 27 2009 it was placed and sanctioned by the Executive Committee of the Bank. The credit rating was not done for the first two loans and the credit rating done before the third loan was below norm. ”
It further says, “...the value of the Corporate Loan/FTIL (Financial Technologies India Limited) converted under the 7.5% CCPS (Compulsorily Convertible Preference Shares) route was ₹112.50 crore but the actual amount recovered by way of sale of shares by IDBI Bank was only ₹46,39,699/- whereas the value of the residual shares has totally eroded and is taken as nil (₹1). Therefore, the bank has suffered loss of ₹112.30 crore approx on account of the said conversion.”
VIP passengers
The charge sheet also names politicians, film actors and industrialists who used an aircraft owned and operated by M/s Kingfisher Airlines Ltd, for non-scheduled flights. Quoting a manager of Corporate Aviation Terminal, the CBI charge sheet says as per the certificate issued by Directorate-General of Civil Aviation and Aircraft, the aircraft with registration no N727VJ is registered out of India.
The statement further says that passengers on such non-scheduled flights included NCP leader Sharad Pawar, his wife Pratibha, his daughter and Lok Sabha MP Supriya Sule and her husband Sadanand Sule, a former Kingfisher Airlines employee Pinky Lalwani, actors Nafisa Joseph, Shah Rukh Khan, chairman of the IPL Rajiv Shukla, former civil aviation minister Praful Patel and industrialists Uday Kotak and Sajjan Jindal.
