BACKGROUND
The recent extradition order of Mr. Vijay Mallya passed on
December 10, 2018 by the Westminster Magistrate's Court in UK
surely comes as a huge sigh of relief for the government and the
Indian banks currently under enormous pressure with a long list of
bad loans and absconding promoters. The UK order has now been
swiftly followed up by the special PMLA court in Mumbai which
declared Mr. Vijay Mallya a 'fugitive economic offender'
under the Fugitive Economic Offenders' Act, 2018
("the said Act") on 5th January
2019.
This leads to an analysis as to why was there the need to enact
the said Act. The answer lies in some alarming statistics. The
number of fraud cases reported by banks, which generally averaged
around 4,500 cases a year in the past 10 years skyrocketed to a
shocking number of 5,835 cases in the year 2017-18. This year
itself it has been estimated that the banking and finance sector
has suffered losses of a staggering amount of Rs. 41,000
