Court orders travel restriction on F1 team boss Mallya

[John S]

Crumbling Indian business empire causing problems.

He's managed to get a complete travel ban amended, the original total ban until 4th Feb would have seen him miss the first F1 test in Jerez.

However in the following piece, from thejudge13.com, suggests things may be closing in on Mallya in particular, and Force India as a result. 
 
Further to TJ13 reporting on Sunday that the Indian authorities had placed travel restrictions on the ex-billionaire Vijay Mallya – a metropolitan magistrate court in Mumbai has decided that the Force India owner can leave India providing he gives the authorities a detailed itinerary of his travel at least 48 hours in advance. In addition to this stipulation is Mallya will have to produce two people as references whenever he has to go out of the country.

Whilst this is not welcome news to the magnate whose empire is crumbling – of possibly more concern to the employees of the team and F1 in general is that for the first time, the salaries of the employees were not paid on time – they were received early this month as opposed to December. The significance of this being that Mallya was always insistent that payment of the salaries was punctual.

The whole of the Force India team is hoping this is merely a temporary problem. Yet with Mallya’s Kingfisher Airline having lost its operator permit in December 2014 and with the AAI – the Airport Authorities of India – filing a civil suit in the Bombay High Court – the omens do not appear favourable for the Silverstone based team.
Courtesy thejudge13.com.

[Jericoke]

I've never been a fan of Mallya or FIF1, but I appreciated that he was always there, and did seem to be involved with the team.  It might be a vanity project, but he could just stay home and sign cheques like others do.

I always wondered though if that was the best use of his time, given the size of his 'empire', focusing on a vanity project might have consequences elsewhere.

Obviously I don't know if the F1 team was a distraction for him or not.  Perhaps he's a victim of bad luck in a fickle economy.

[Scott]

What a drag.  Hope he digs his way out - he's grown on me and I like the way he's run the team.

[Alianora La Canta]

The word "whoops" comes to mind. Maybe if Mr Mallya had been a bit better at turning up for court appearances, this need not have happened.

I don't think the travel itinerary will be an issue as Mallya has many fans in the business world, despite a debt level that makes Vijay holding the business together pretty unlikely. He's already had to split parts of it off to keep the airline's existence going this far.

While I doubt Force India will still be Mallya-operated at the end of 2016 (I expect Vijay to be in some prison cell somewhere, due to owing staff at Kingfisher wages dating back multiple years and coming up with some pretty "inventive" excuses for not paying), but it may still be Mallya-owned, since Vijay has proven he will go a long way to protect the team's existence and integrity.

Jeri, the F1 team was an out-and-out advantage for Vijay for the first two years he had it. However, the recession hurt Vijay's airline immensely (lower-middle class Indians, the previous mainstay of Vijay's Kingfisher airline, could not afford the "affordable luxury" airline any more and either stopped flying or used "no-frills" services, and Vijay wasn't in a position to reconfigure an entire airline). He's had to sell large parts of his liquor business to keep his chances of ever getting it airborne again alive (yes Kingfisher lost its operator licence, but Indian rules mean it could reapply if it demonstrated two consecutive years of solvency and met other none-too-tricky conditions). The sensible move would have been to ditch the airline (even if it did do fantastically well pre-recession) in 2011 or 2012 when he still had enough liquid assets to do it, pay the staff off promptly and properly, and concentrate on keeping the rest doing well until conditions for developing a new, post-recession airline were in place. F1 didn't distract Vijay - the romance of a luxury airline did. He may well be the only guy in the paddock for whom F1 is not the riskiest part of the corporate portfolio.

I like the way Vijay runs Force India a lot. I dislike the way he runs Kingfisher. I hope the latter doesn't hurt the former too much.

[Irisado]

I'm not a fan of Mallya as a person, and his business affairs in India look pretty dodgy to me; however, Force India is an exceptionally well run team.  I really hope that whatever happens to Mallya does not impact on Force India in any way, but I fear that this is rather idealistic.

[F1fanaticBD]

While airline staff were struggling to get their pay, he was throwing the most luxurious party in the coast of Monaco, no matter what he say, certain people with significant prosecution power will not buy it. And perhaps that is the reason they kept coming at him with whatever they could came up with.

[Alianora La Canta]

In fairness, F1fanaticBD, it's not as if Vijay has made himself a difficult target in other respects either. Some of his excuses for not paying the various state tax bills for his airline operations have been pretty implausible...