RAJYA SABHA ENTRY

BAD LOANS GET WORSE

ESCAPE

NEW DELHI: "I met the finance minister before I left, repeated my offer to settle with the banks. That is the truth." As fugitive liquor baron Vijay Mallya uttered these words outside a London court on Wednesday, a blame game ensued. Congress pinned the blame on finance minister Arun Jaitley while BJP went so far as to say that Mallya's Kingfisher Airlines was in fact Rahul Gandhi ’s company that he owns by proxy. The fact is, both parties helped Mallya at various stages of his success and crisis. Here’s how:Both BJP and Congress helped Vijay Mallya enter Rajya Sabha, with help from JD(S). He was elected to the Rajya Sabha in 2002 as an independent member from Karnataka with the support of Congress and JD (S). In 2010, he got elected for a second term with the backing of BJP and JD(S).The airline, launched in 2005, kept on expanding furiously and piling loans despite making big losses as early as 2009. Banks kept lending him money to rollover Kingfisher's loans and that, some say, wouldn't have been possible without political support, especially since many of these banks were government owned.A consortium of 17 banks collectively lent over Rs 7,000 crore to the crisis-ridden airline.That's been the focus of politics ever since the disgraced tycoon said that he met finance minister Arun Jaitley in Parliament before he left for London. BJP MP Subramanian Swamy had alleged earlier (and now Congress does too) that CBI , which was probing Kingfisher's financial irregularities, had issued a notice in October 2015 to block Mallya from trying to leave India.That notice was changed a month later to 'report' when he leaves the country. CBI officials say it was a technical mistake that was corrected. Curiously, Mallya left India on the same day banks moved debt recovery tribunal to seek his arrest and seize his passport.