Bengaluru: The Debt Recovery Tribunal here will on Thursday pronounce its order on the pleas of SBI-led consortium of banks for recovery of over Rs 9,000 crore from beleaguered liquor baron Vijay Mallya in the Kingfisher Airlines case.
DRT Presiding Officer K Sreenivasan said this while hearing an Interlocutory Application pertaining to the case. “I will be pronouncing the verdict on the pleas of banks for recovering money in this case tomorrow,” he said.
The presiding officer in a recent directive had reserved orders on the Original Application filed by the consortium and also 30-odd Interlocutory Applications, including several by Mallya and his companies, without specifying any date.
The order on Thursday will bring the curtains down on the nearly three-year legal battle in the tribunal by the consortium, comprising 17 banks, to recover the money owed by the defunct airlines.
The verdict will be pronounced at the new rented space which will be inaugurated on Thursday. DRT had been conducting hearings from the current building since December 1994, and is the oldest tribunal in South India.
Initially, DRT Bengaluru handled cases of Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Puduchery, but gradually its burden lessened after respective states had its own DRTs.
The tribunal spent over Rs two crore for renovation of the rented space, according to a top DRT official.
The lenders had moved the DRT in 2013 to recover dues from the defunct airline. SBI had filed three other applications also, including one seeking Mallya’s arrest and impounding his passport, for “defaulting” on loans.
Mallya, who left the country on March 2 last year and is now in the UK, has been declared Proclaimed Offender by a special PMLA court. – PTI