The extradition hearing of Vijay Mallya continued at Westminster Magistrates Court in London on Friday. Judge Emma Arbuthnot said she would seek further clarification from India on certain documents, but described as “blindingly obvious” the prosecution’s contention about the bank not following its own rules when it came to lending decisions relating to Mallya.
The hearing continued to focus on the admissibility of evidence, following a hearing in January, with the defence barrister Clare Montgomery, attacking the structure of the prosecution’s case, which she said rested on police statements that did not have underlying material, documents with “no evidence of provenance,” and whose relevance one had to judge by inference from 161 witness statements, which rested on “expo facto” analysis that would not meet criteria of admissibility in a UK court.
“There is a mass of evidence but once you break it all out the question is: Is this admissible? The answer is none of it,” concluded Montgomery.
“It’s like a jigsaw puzzle,” said Judge Emma Arbuthnot of the case, as she said there were “certainly signs” the bank had gone against their own guidelines when it came to sanctioning the loan to Mallya. She, however, sought further details on the origin of documents included in the prosecution’s case. “I will invite the Indian authorities to explain the position with page numbers. If it was a conspiracy involving [Yogesh] Agarwal – Chairman of the bank – it would be useful to have some page numbers,” she told the court. “This is all about detail.”
Accusations that IDBI bent rules to disburse loans to Mallya that he never intended to repay, form part of the prosecution’s case as it attempts to extradite Mallya on the grounds of fraud and money laundering.
The hearing continued on Friday afternoon, as this paper went to print, as the prosecution rejected the defence’s picture of the robustness of its evidence presented to date, including around whether privilege applied to some of the evidence presented.