For a fugitive, Mallya lived well. He spent his weeks in the city, running what remained of his businesses or holding court at the nearby Dorchester Hotel. On the weekends he drove up to Ladywalk, a country estate about an hour out of town, bought for a reported £11 million from the father of Lewis Hamilton, the F1 driver.3 Even so, his newly straitened circumstances were often in the news, with properties seized and sports cars confiscated. Even his 95-meter super-yacht, the Indian Empress, which he typically moored on the French Riviera, was later impounded after a dispute with its crew over hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of unpaid wages.4 Even his trademark haircut—a flamboyant mullet of the kind sometimes described as “business at the front, party at the back”—seemed forlorn, as if no longer quite appropriate for a man hitting hard times in his early sixties.
Then there were the signs of the home to which he was no longer able to return. A pile of newspapers sat next to him on the table with the Asian Age at the top, its headlines filled with shenanigans in New Delhi. A crystal clock with two faces sat on the desk: the right showed British time, the left Indian. Two grand homes in Britain might seem plenty, but Mallya once split his time between a dozen or more: five in India, along with a private South African game reserve and places in Monaco, California, and New York’s Trump Tower.5 Just as Mukesh Ambani built Antilia to tower over Mumbai, so Mallya had built a grand new residence in Bangalore, where his businesses were based. Some years before, he had knocked down his family’s old bungalow and replaced it with a garish skyscraper named Kingfisher Tower. This was partly a commercial venture, with apartments for sale in the lower levels. But perched at the top on a slab of white concrete was a 40,000-square-foot “sky bungalow” for Mallya’s own use, said to be worth $20 million. India’s most conspicuous McMansion looked vaguely like the White House, albeit 400 feet further up in the air. Given his refugee status, it was unclear whether its owner would ever actually get to live in it.6
“It’s not going to happen for a few generations. I mean, it’s a very deep-rooted system of corruption,” he went on, his shoulders hunched, talking about faltering government attempts to cut graft. The revenue authorities were particular offenders, he claimed, demanding bribes many times higher than the value of the tax they were meant to collect. “You can’t weed corruption out of the system completely. In India it’s almost inbred. They [tax inspectors] are asking for ten times the money. Otherwise, fine, they’ll put you behind bars.” For Mallya these were hardly academic concerns. Until a few years earlier he had been one of his country’s most celebrated industrialists, a man whose wealth and flamboyance embodied the spirit of a newly confident nation. But then in early 2017 India’s authorities filed corruption charges against him relating to the collapse of his Kingfisher airline, which had gone bust in spectacular fashion five years earlier, leaving behind mountainous debts and thousands of irate, unpaid staff.7
Mallya paused, flicked open the lighter, and lit another cigarillo. “In India all this kind of jazz happens. You know, they throw you in jail and say, ‘sit there,’ ” he went on, his voice gravelly but suddenly serious. “Why should I put myself in risk? Why should I not be entitled to a fair trial?…So I’m stuck here.”
“Here” was London, home to troubled Russian oligarchs and Indian Bollygarchs alike. In March 2016 Mallya took a first-class seat on a scheduled flight and left New Delhi for the last time. At the time, he denied flatly that he had fled. But as we talked, a little over a year later, he admitted he was unlikely to return anytime soon. Once a member of the Rajya Sabha, the Indian upper house of parliament, his diplomatic passport had long since been canceled. As a longtime UK resident he was permitted to stay in the country. But without a passport he was unable to travel abroad, curtailing almost entirely his notorious jet-setting lifestyle and leaving him effectively stateless.
To make matters worse, just a month before we met Mallya found himself arrested by British police on charges of money laundering, relating to the same set of investigations back home.8 He protested his innocence and walked free the same day, having been granted bail. At the time he was defiant, standing on the street outside Westminster Magistrates’ Court and telling a scrum of cameras they could “keep dreaming about the billion pounds” he might one day repay to his creditors.9 Sitting in his study, however, he seemed circumspect. He now faced many years paying expensive UK legal fees to beat back extradition proceedings from Indian authorities that wanted him to face questions about loan defaults and allegations of fraud.
“It’s a matter which will just play out in court over God knows how long. I mean, it’s a complete witch hunt,” he told me. Such was the political furor over his case that a fair trial would be impossible back home, he claimed; as soon as he landed he risked being tipped into New Delhi’s notorious Tihar prison. “[The media are] whipping up sentiment. Defaults. Stolen money. Mallya-gate. Theft.” As he spoke, he raised both hands in exasperation to emphasize each point. “It became not just difficult to go back, it became unwise for me to go back…My lawyers said: ‘Look, you’ll be stupid if you come back. Because you’ll be expecting a one-way ticket to Tihar.’ ”
Mallya’s complaints about a media frenzy were real enough. India’s newspapers and TV talk shows charted enthusiastically each new stage in his downfall, splashing stories about the $2 billion he was said to owe his bankers, suppliers, and former employees.10 Initially forgiving, his lenders grew gradually more irate too, moving to seize his mansions, planes, and cars. At one time it was common for the press to hail him as the face of a vibrant new Indian consumer economy: the “Branson of Bangalore” as magazine profiles often put it. Now TV pundits called him a debt defaulter, painting him as the epitome of a new kind of unscrupulous tycoon, whose recklessness had torpedoed India’s banks and besmirched the name of its business community. The evident luxury of his exile, even as his creditors and ex-employees went unpaid, merely compounded his disgrace.
Mallya remained phlegmatic in the face of all this; a likable rogue and raconteur, although one with more business nous than his playboy image might have suggested. Facts about loan default rates and details of old contracts tumbled out as we talked, as he tried to set records straight. Clearly frustrated with his position, his tone veered between defiance and self-pity, with just the occasional flash of the insouciant self-confidence of old. The next day would be the Monaco Grand Prix, the highlight of each year’s circuit. Mallya had previously hosted a glittering annual soirée aboard his yacht. This year he would watch on television at his place in Hertfordshire, in the company of his five dogs and a few invited friends.
More than anything, his critics attacked Mallya for his departure, as if that act alone was a prima facie indication of guilt. “They decided very quickly that I should be the poster boy of loan default, and only because I attracted maybe the maximum media attention,” he said at one point, referring both to his press accusers and to his former friends in politics who now pilloried him as the unacceptable face of Indian capitalism. He had never been India’s richest tycoon—others ran larger and more profitable businesses—but Mallya came to personify both the brash optimism of India’s mid-2000s boom and the unedifying corruption and corporate debt scandals that followed. If Mukesh Ambani stood at the zenith of the Billionaire Raj, so it was Vijay Mallya, more than anyone, who knew what it felt like to clamber up towards the peak, only to slide ignominiously down again.
Towards the end of our conversation he took a call from a friend in the motor sport world and gossiped knowledgeably for five minutes about racing drivers and their form. When the call was over, and just before he left to rouse the chauffeur and head up to his country estate, he turned reflective. “I’ve lived here since ’92. My mother is here. My son is here. My daughter’s flying in from New York very often…So yeah, I’ve a comfortable life here. It’s a little frustrating that I cannot be at the Grand Prix. That’s the price I have to pa
y.”
The Court of King Vijay
Mallya in his pomp was a creature of the night, and few nights were more spectacular than December 18, 2005. That evening the tycoon welcomed friends to Kingfisher Villa, his mansion in the sunshine state of Goa on India’s west coast, for the third day of a lavish four-day fiftieth birthday celebration. Guests drove up to imposing front gates designed to look like a Buddhist pagoda, with large “VM” initials carved on the pillars. Then they were ushered past the Ferraris and swimming pools (one featured an underwater treadmill) and down towards the lawns by the sea. Leggy models mingled with Bollywood stars and an assortment of Mallya’s fellow industrialists, many of whom had made the trip down by private jet. Others were ferried in on two Airbuses the tycoon borrowed from his own airline. At some point later in the evening Lionel Richie turned up to entertain the crowd and sing “Happy Birthday” to the host, before the two airliners performed a fly-by over the beach.11
The year 2005 had been good to Mallya. That spring he wrapped up a long-awaited deal to buy Shaw Wallace, a rival spirit maker. The acquisition transformed his United Breweries group into one of the world’s largest liquor companies, cementing its dominance over the domestic booze trade. Then, in May, Mallya launched Kingfisher Airlines, a daring attempt to tap into India’s growing taste for domestic air travel. At that year’s Paris air show he splashed out $3 billion to buy a dozen new Airbus planes, including five giant A380s, a clear signal of his plans to launch an international carrier too.12 Such ambitions were expensive but they did his bank balance little harm. Forbes published its annual Rich List a few weeks before his fiftieth birthday, showing Mallya’s fortune creeping up to $950 million.13
That year had been good to India, too. Its previous government, led by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), had lost power the year before, as voters spurned its optimistic “India shining” slogan and elected a new Congress-led coalition government, which promised to do more to help farmers and the poor. As new prime minister Manmohan Singh settled into office, India’s circumstances looked promising. The economy purred along at around nine percent, an unheard-of level in a country that had long endured what was mockingly called the “Hindu rate of growth”—in the low single digits prior to liberalization in 1991.
A new optimism took hold, which Mallya himself seemed to embody. India’s commercial elite had long been dominated by cautious, discreet industrialists. Even Dhirubhai Ambani, the most aggressive of the generation that rose in the decades either side of liberalization, dressed in plain white shirts, spent with restraint and carefully guarded his privacy. Mallya was different: rich, powerful and not inclined to hide it; a bolder breed than those who had come before.
The tycoon’s rise began more than two decades earlier in 1983, when his father died suddenly of a heart attack. Vittal Mallya was a canny, low-key businessman who bought United Breweries cheaply just after the Second World War, when he was only in his mid-twenties. The company made its name serving inexpensive local beer to British imperial soldiers, doing away with the need to import India pale ale from the UK. A precise and orderly man, the elder Mallya expanded his business methodically, buying out rival breweries, building his own, and learning to navigate the convoluted web of regulations that soon settled over India after 1947. The company he left behind made for a handily profitable inheritance, albeit one his only son was not remotely prepared to take over.
Vijay Mallya grew up in the eastern city of Kolkata, living with his mother while his father worked in Bangalore in the south. His flashy tastes began early. As a kid he drove a child-size Ferrari around his home; in his later teens he took to the streets in a turbocharged Porsche 911.14 After college he joined the family firm, working first in sales, then moving to New Jersey to intern briefly at a US division. By the time his father died the younger man had achieved little beyond a clipping book of racy tabloid stories, mostly involving women and cars.
Mallya’s early days in charge were marked by incoherent expansion. He launched a pizza chain, a cola brand and a telecoms manufacturer, as if trying to prove right those skeptics who thought him too young and ill-disciplined to run his father’s businesses. He spent a portion of the year in Sausalito, just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, where his wife and children lived for much of the year. There he bought a vineyard, a craft beer maker and a newspaper, in whose waterfront office he parked his growing classic car collection.15 But in the end these various flirtations mattered little so long as his beer and spirits businesses prospered, which they did, especially as Mallya began to show a flair for promotion that his father lacked. Over time he learned to focus, shutting or selling ventures from pharmaceuticals to fast food and focusing mostly on drink.16 Most importantly, he resuscitated Kingfisher, a moribund beer brand, turning it first into India’s dominant lager, then a global curry-house staple.
Sitting in London, Mallya seemed relaxed about his youthful excesses. “I became the darling of the media. It was all to do with lifestyle. My parties. My fast cars,” he told me. “If I took charge at the age of 27, I behaved like a 27-year-old. But they started comparing me to Dhirubhai Ambani…A 27-year-old wants to drive a red Ferrari, a 50-year-old might not be interested in a red Ferrari. So I just lived my age.” Conspicuous though it was, he claimed a clear commercial logic behind his antics too. With alcohol advertising banned in India, drinks companies had to scramble to reach customers in other ways. Some gave away samples. Mallya promoted himself.
“I did what Branson does,” he told me. “I lived the brand.” Newspapers wrote about his parties at Kingfisher Villa, or carried photos of models from his annual Kingfisher swimsuit calendar. The move into airlines was partly driven by a love of flying: like Branson, Mallya had long lusted after the glamour of airline ownership. There was an element of opportunism too; the sector’s liberalization in 1993 meant that Indian aviation remained relatively open terrain. But above all, the plan was part of a longer-term strategy to launch everything from Kingfisher cruise ships to luxury trains, a move that clearly mimicked Branson’s proliferating family of Virgin brands. Mallya denied it, but some industry observers wondered wryly if the tycoon had actually launched his airline as the ultimate form of brand extension, using his planes merely as expensive product placement opportunities through which to promote beer sales. Others compared the brash tycoon to another celebrated self-promoter: “Mallya is more like an Indian version of Donald Trump,” his biographer wrote. “He not only lives as The King of Good Times, but he is working overtime to persuade others to live the high life too.”17
With his shoulder-length hair, earrings and taste for bling, Mallya honed an image as the most piratical of entrepreneurs, striding into his own parties late in the evening, often many hours after his guests had arrived. When mobile phones became common it was said he walked in trailed by flunkies carrying his devices on a silver platter.18 A specially kitted-out Boeing 727, its bar filled with his own products, whisked him between parties and business meetings, a distinction that in any case was often hazy to all involved. One ex–board member at a Mallya company told me: “I remember being told to come for a board meeting at 10 a.m., so we flew down the night before, and the meeting did happen at ten—just ten in the evening…was all a bit ridiculous. He had homes in every country, he never traveled with a suitcase because he had extra clothes in different places…in the end you have to think this excessive lifestyle was part of the reason he made mistakes.”
Despite the theatrics, Mallya still made serious money. In 2006, he entered the Forbes list as a full billionaire and bought his prized super-yacht, one of the world’s largest. The next year he bought Whyte & Mackay, the Scotch whiskey maker, for £595 million. His ambitions began winning attention abroad. “Mr. Mallya personally is the sort of unfettered corporate czar that many American boardrooms have not seen in at least half a century,” the New York Times said, as he pushed on
with plans to take Kingfisher global. “He surrounds himself with a close group of longtime advisers, wears copious diamonds, holds business meetings at his house until five in the morning, winks at female journalists and flaunts the ‘good times’ corporate motif.”19
For all the cartoonishness, Mallya was also a complex figure, with a precise and controlling side. He vetted the hiring of even lowly airline stewards and demanded staff text him whenever his planes landed. The outward flamboyance disguised a man with apparently sincere religious beliefs, a faith that grew stronger when he escaped from a helicopter crash in 2003. A showman in public, he befriended spiritualists in private, donated gold to their temples, and disappeared into seclusion for many weeks each year, readying himself for a pilgrimage to a southern Indian hill shrine. Each new Kingfisher plane flew down to the temple town of Tirupati, close to the Sri Venkateswara Temple in the eastern state of Andhra Pradesh, to be blessed by priests on the tarmac.
The tycoon’s relationship with India’s establishment was double-edged too. Mallya reveled in playing the rule breaker. “I am flamboyant…and why not?” he once said. “I am in the alcohol business. Whether people like it or not, I drink and I will continue to drink, because I enjoy it.”20 In private, many business leaders disparaged his antics, viewing him as dissolute and more than a little unscrupulous. Yet Mallya also yearned for acceptance as a visionary and serious business leader, to rank alongside the lauded software billionaires of his adopted hometown of Bangalore. He asked to be addressed as “Dr. Mallya,” despite holding just an honorary doctorate from a US distance-learning college. His hard-drinking lifestyle had little in common with an ascetic like Gandhi. But in 2009 he spent nearly $2 million to buy various of the Mahatma’s effects at auction in New York, including a pocket watch and a pair of his iconic rounded glasses. The purchase allowed Mallya to paint himself as a patriot; a respectable man who used his fortune to serve the nation.
The Billionaire Raj Page 6