Vijay Mallya, who has been in the hot seat with money laundering and fraud charges in India, for the past nine years, has spoken up about his downfall and what went wrong at the time with Kingfisher Airlines.
While speaking to podcaster Raj Shamani, when asked about getting a loan for Kingfisher Airlines from a consortium of banks when the company was crashing, Mallya said that he was offered a loan by the banks because they believed in the vision of the company and that they did their own thorough checks before giving him a loan.
"I kept everything on line for Kingfisher but that's not appreciated, that is sad but let the narrative be what it is," he said. He further added, "Please never forget, I have given my personal guarantee and United Breweries Holdings Limited gave its personal guarantee (while getting the loan)."
"If anybody has bad intentions...if anybody had intentions to divert money, would anyone put themselves on the line with a personal guarantee?" he asked in the episode of the podcast.
He also spoke about being labelled as a thief and said, "Chor kabhi apna personal guarantee deta hai kya?" He further said that this is the reason that he hasn't tried changing the narrative that has been made about him in the last nine years.
He also spoke about BJP's Sambit Patra holding press conferences trying to establish a "nexus" between Mallya and former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh with the letters that Mallya had written to Singh and "alleging some sort of wrong doing by the then Congress Prime Minister."
In the same podcast, Mallya said that he might seriously think about returning to India if he is promised a fair trial in the country. "If I have a fair assurance of a fair trail and dignified existence in India, I will think about it (returning to India) seriously," he said.
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