|THE DEN|
Peak net worth: $1.4billion
Current net worth: $1.2billion
‘I’m the brand’
-Vijay Mallya
Well, Vijay Mallya is someone who doesn’t need introduction, he never needed actually due to his flamboyant personality. Just the difference is then he used to be known as a business tycoon and now as a fugitive who owes 17 Indian banks an estimated Rs 9,000 crores.
The only thing that made everything end was that he was excessively optimistic and if his airline business had not gone wrong then the narrative would have been something else. His story tells us that sometimes to make good decisions in business we need to be pessimistic.
What is the story of the king of good times?
Vijay Mallya’s father, Vittal Mallya was sort of a secretive millionaire, he was the chairman of one of the biggest empire of brewing “United Breweries”. In 1983, when Vijay turned 28, his dad died and he suddenly had to shift from being very carefree to a responsible young man in order to run this huge business his father had created.
The liquor baron Vijay Mallya wanted to change the Indian perspective towards alcohol and drinking culture. He never wanted to be secretive like his father, however he always wanted to be recognized, and contradicting his father’s prediction he actually did really well.
The business with kingfisher was going fine then at that time in 1995 the Indian government banned advertisements of alcohol on televisions. Accordingly Vijay became a pioneer in different kinds of advertisements, from the jingle ♪ ooh, la, la, la, ooh, la, oh ♪ to the adverts for kingfisher sodas, he was advertising beer in surrogate manner i.e, he wasn’t advertising for the beer but kingfisher ultimately was communicating with the audience. Therefore this ban didn’t come out as a barrier for him into selling the culture of enjoying drinking to Indians.
But this wasn’t enough. He wanted to be number one, to be recognized all over the world, therefore in 2003 he launched Kingfisher airlines and it started with a bang ! Without any skepticism Kingfisher indeed revolutionised air travel in India.
‘Everyone is welcome here’
- Kingfisher Airlines motto
If everything was brilliant then what went wrong ?
Mallya wanted to expand his business and in order to do that he required an enormous amount of money. So he expanded Kingfisher Airlines by borrowing more & more money from state banks.
The airline started providing a lot of extravagant services and that was the point when the vision of creating a low cost carrier started fading off. Even after losing more than 347 crores he ordered 18 new aircrafts, I mean he was extremely confident on Kingfisher.
In October 2007 he bought a Formula One team, then in 2008 he bought a cricket team. He was doing everything of his interest but ultimately on the Indian bank’s money.
The problem was he overpaid for that airline, he needed to borrow frequently solely to keep that whole airline’s business afloat, this debt mountain was growing very badly and he went on the verge of bankruptcy.
By November, 2011 he literally bet everything to rescue the airline but it didn’t happen the things went out of control and as a result he took a very bad move that he stopped paying salaries to his employees.
Eventually the airline closed !
Mallya argued that this was a business failure but investigators found him guilty for theft, bank looting, cheating, criminal conspiracy, money laundering and diversion of loan funds.
Vijay Mallya left the country on March 2, 2016 just hours before the Supreme Court ordered his detention and immediate repayment of outstanding loans and he never came back from London. In February 2017, India sent an extradition request. Since then he has been fighting an extradition case in the UK high court and remains on bail.
On July 26, 2021 Indian banks won the first step in the case since UK High Court Declared Vijay Mallya Bankrupt. Now banks are recovering the debt by selling his assets.