Mallya’s extradition hearing to resume in London today
:The Westminster Magistrates’ Court hearing the extradition case of controversial businessman Vijay Mallya will resume hearing on Friday, when the admissibility of some documents submitted by India to substantiate its case will be discussed.
Mallya, wanted in India for alleged financial irregularities, was given bail until April 2 at the last hearing on January 12 when his lawyer, Claire Montgomery, had objected to the admissibility of the documents on various grounds.
The documents, submitted on India’s behalf by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) lawyer, Mark Summers, related to an IDBI loan and was a part of what he called “chapters of dishonesty” on Mallya’s part – a claim strongly refuted by Montgomery.
At Friday’s hearing, Summers is expected to refute her arguments against the documents’ admissibility, with a ruling on it by the chief magistrate,
LONDON
Emma Arbuthnot, likely to follow. A CPS spokesperson said, “The next date for Vijay Mallya is for legal argument re: admissibility of evidence, and is listed at Westminster Magistrates’ Court on March 16…The judgment will most likely be in May”.
At the January hearing, Montgomery said that since the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) was allegedly used in political cases, the behaviour of its officers was not reliable and they had failed to present supporting evidence to their charges against Mallya.
She particularly picked several holes in 12 witness statements submitted by India and said they had identical spelling mistakes, unintelligible passages, and repeated parts verbatim. “They seem to be someone else's assertions...there seems to be a preconceived desire to blame the applicant when no evidence existed,” she said, adding that parts were repeated in a cut-and-paste manner in the statements.