Liquor baron Vijay Mallya's life is never short on drama.
After being out of the headlines for a short while, Mallya is back claiming that he's being blackmailed by an outfit that hacked his Twitter account and posted documents allegedly revealing a host of Mallya's personal financial details including the valuation of some of his properties.
Mallya, who is still overseas to avoid Indian law enforcement agencies, owes Indian banks nearly Rs 9,000 crore. As such, details about his wealth and assets are of considerable interest to the Indian financial system and law enforcement agencies who have attached some of his assets to help recover dues.
On Friday, liquor baron Vijay Mallya claimed that his twitter and email accounts had been hacked by an outfit called Legion which was “blackmailing” him. Legion, on its part, claimed responsibility for the hacking via a tweet on Mallya's account.
An email sent to the UB Group, where Mallya is still chairman, seeking clarity on the veracity of the documents made public via the hack remains unanswered.
My account has been hacked by some one called Legion who are Tweeting now in my name. Simply ignore. Will fix this .
Legion seems to have accessed some of Mallya's personal documents through his email accounts and posted these online. The documents appear to include details of Mallya's overseas assets, passports, outstanding dues, contracts for cricket leagues among other things.
BloombergQuint could not independently verify the authenticity of these documents and, hence, is not putting out details included in them.
A series of tweets appeared on Mallya's twitter timeline after he claimed that his account was hacked. In these tweets, the group Legion denied that they were blackmailing Mallya and threatened to provide even more documents at a later stage. The tweets were subsequently deleted from Mallya's profile.
The files already put out on Mallya's twitter handle disclose the value of some of his overseas assets as on March 2016, including investments in yachts, commercial property and shares in various companies. BloombergQuint could not verify the information independently.
One of the documents titled “funds required” lists salaries and expenses that Mallya needs to pay for his yachts by December 10. Another file in the data dump is a valuation report by Knight Frank for Mallya's house situated at Sardar Patel Marg in New Delhi and Worli in Mumbai. BloombergQuint could not immediately verify the authenticity of the valuation report from Knight Frank. Knight Frank is yet to respond to an email query from BloombergQuint asking for it to confirm the authenticity of the document.
The documents seem to confirm earlier reported transactions by Mallya through Edmond De Rothschild Bank in Geneva. A document dated November 18, 2016 and purportedly submitted to the Supreme Court has also been made public by the hackers. BloombergQuint contacted the Bank for a confirmation but the email didn't elicit any immediate response.
The hacking comes just a week after the Karnataka High Court ordered Mallya to appear before it on January 19 for framing of charges in a contempt case filed by State Bank of India two years ago. The Bank pleaded to get an arrest warrant against Mallya who left India for the U.K. on March 2 when investigations against him started for diversion of funds and willful default of loans worth more than Rs 9,000 crore taken by his now defunct Kingfisher Airlines Ltd.
On March 13, Mallya defended himself through a public statement claiming that banks had already recovered Rs 2,494 crore from Kingfisher Airlines since 2013.
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