A British court hearing the extradition case of embattled liquor baron Vijay Mallya has rejected two extradition requests by India in recent weeks.
Judges at Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London ruled in favour of U.K.-based alleged bookie Sanjeev Kumar Chawla on October 16 and also discharged a fraud case against a British Indian couple, Jatinder and Asha Rani Angurala, on October 12.
The rulings come just weeks before the extradition case against Mallya, wanted in India on loan defaults to several banks amounting to about ₹9,000 crore, comes up for its next case management hearing on November 20 to determine the course of the extradition trial scheduled to start on December 4.
The case against Chawla, the key accused in the cricket match-fixing scandal involving former South African captain Hanse Cronje in 2000, was discharged by District Judge Rebecca Crane on human rights grounds over severe conditions in Tihar Jail in Delhi where he was to be held on being extradited.
In the case of the Anguralas, Senior District Judge Emma Arbuthnot — also presiding over the Mallya case — ruled that it would be unjust to extradite them after nearly a quarter of a century since the fraud was alleged to have taken place when Jatinder was a branch manager at the Bank of India in Jalandhar.
The Anguralas were wanted for fraud dating back to between 1990 and 1993 against the public sector bank, causing a total loss of about £24,000.
