Budget 2017: Jaitley cracks whip on absconding economic offenders, new law confiscates assets
- Government is considering the introduction of a new law to confiscate assets of offenders
- Will that mean offenders like Mallya will have to pay up?
Follow
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley made it known that now that the BJP government has developed an image of being one that can be trusted as a custodian of public money, it is imperative that the Budget 2017 continues to do so.
In one of his statements during relaying the Budget, Jaitley said that the government was considering the introduction of a new law to confiscate assets of offenders who escape the country. He also stated that India was a largely a tax non-compliant society, where too many people evade taxes and the burden falls on those who are honest.
Was that a subtle reference to Kingfisher liquor baron Vijay Mallya? We can only guess.
Jaitley, here is echoing what Narendra Modi had said in the G20 summit: “We need to act to eliminate safe havens for economic offenders, track down and unconditionally extradite money launderers and break down the web of complex international regulations and excessive banking secrecy that hide the corrupt and their deeds.”
Also read: How will the banks recover Rs 9000 crore from Mallya?
Coming to what Jaitely has so emphatically stated in the Budget 2017, it does not bode well for Vijay Mallya who is finally in the docks. Industrialist Vijay Mallya left the country on March 2, the day public sector banks, to whom he owed an estimated ₹9,091 crore in loans put a case against him for failure to pay up the funds.
Loans worth lakhs of crore rupees provided by Indian public sector banks are now classified as non-performing assets or NPAs and nobody knows for sure how much money will be recovered because people like Mallya have easily evaded the system.
Mallya managed to get a ₹900-crore loan from state-run bank Industrial Development Bank of India, which ignored warnings from some of its officers to hastily and unusually clear the massive amount in just a month in 2009. In the middle of last year we also had news of the SBI reportedly writing off loans worth ₹7,000 crore, including that of Vijay Mallya-promoted Kingfisher Airlines, with both the government and the bank maintaining that there was no loan waiver and the liability on the borrowers still remains.
