Kingfisher staff go for a toss, again

Vijay Mallya splurges on cricket; but what about the trauma of 2,000 unpaid employees of his defunct airline?

 

His carefully-cropped white hair was shining under the arc lights as Vijay Mallya kept grinning from ear to ear moments after his IPL team, Royal Challengers, snapped up Yuvraj Singh for a whopping Rs 14 crore. In all, he spent over Rs 29 crore for his latest acquisitions – nine players -- on day one of the IPL auctions. This is apart from the money showered on the three mega stars, Virat Kohli, Chris Gayle and AB de Villiers ,  whom he had chosen to retain.

 

It seemed India Inc’s great spender who claimed to live life kingsize has made a comeback after a few months of pause.

 

Mallya was obviously in high spirits, lecturing all and sundry about why scams are inevitable in sports and why Arvind Kejriwal was pursuing "unconventional methods" to attain his objectives .

 

But wait a minute. While all of India seemed to have been glued to TV sets all through the day to see their icons coming under the hammer, a substantial section would have seethed in anger. Doesn’t this man or his companies owe hundreds of crores to banks of all shapes and sizes; hasn’t he failed to pay salaries to the employees of his now-defunct airlines, Kingfisher, for almost a year-and-a -half? What would be his response to the trauma and financial hardship that these 2,000 unpaid employees are going through? Most of them are in fact facing threat from banks attaching their flats following non-payment of instalments.

 

 Nothing more could be a more crude display of opulence at the expense of others.

 

 Mallya’s nonchalance even in the face of extreme adversity was something ordinary mortals would die for. After all, not many people would have the guts to be in high spirits on a day when UB Holdings  tanked on the stock exchanges   after the company reported a net loss of Rs 3.55 crore in the third quarter of 2013 as against net profit of Rs 38.92 crore in the corresponding period of the previous year. Shortly thereafter, reports came in that g rounded carrier Kingfisher ’s net loss has mounted to Rs 822   crore.

 

That’s not all. The flamboyant industrialist is also  battling against losing control of his corporate empire – whatever is left of it .  In several firms in the United Breweries Group, his ownership has shrunk. In some others, lenders have started selling large portions of his holdings that were pledged with them. But if his personal properties are still out of the clutches of his lenders, it’s because of the classic argument – that is, it is Kingfisher Airlines that owes the money, not him personally.

 

And then there are several winding-up petitions by sundry unsecured creditors of Kingfisher against associate companies of its parent UB Group, which has given corporate guarantees for the airline’s debt.

 

All that, of course, is far from Mallya’s thought process at this point. After all, he has better things to worry about. For example, how Kolkata Knight Riders led him up the garden path and forced him to shell out Rs 4 crore more than what he had originally bid for Yuvraj. Or, choosing the ladies in the Kingfisher calendar for next year.

 

Long Live RCB; Kingfisher employees and others can wait.