Vijay Mallya, the flamboyant owner of the United Breweries group and the troubled Kingfisher Airlines, is open to constructive criticism. He is willing to take suggestions from lenders on possible management or board changes to revive the flagging airline. He is also talking to potential strategic and non-strategic investors and looking forward to the government notification on allowing foreign airlines to buy an up to 49 per cent stake in domestic airlines.
He wrote to the airlines' employees on Monday that junior staff would be paid salaries on 4 April 2012 and pilots on 9 April. Engineers will be paid on 10 April. He told the staff in an email that the company's bank accounts were unfrozen after paying Rs 44 crore to the income tax department and Rs 20 crore to the service tax department.
Kingfisher last Tuesday said that it temporarily stopped operations to several destinations as per its revised flight schedule, and most employees at those places have been asked to "stay at home." The company called it a ‘holding plan' ahead of recapitalization.
Vijay Mallya sent an email response to NDTV queries recently.
Here are excerpts from the exclusive interaction:
Firstly, we cannot understand how CAPA is qualified to comment on promoter companies.
The promoter guarantees are from UBHL only, backed by a personal guarantee from me. USL/UBL or any other group company has not given any guarantees or pledged any assets towards KFA loans. The guarantees are relevant after the pledged assets of KFA itself are realized which form the primary security. However, we are far away from guarantee enforcement at this stage.
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