In a surprising discovery, the owner of a “sky mansion” built on top of a sky scrapper in India, Vijay Mallya is reported not to have seen the building in person.
The mansion, which cost $20 million has features like an infinity pool, a helipad, and a surrounding deck.
It is built on top of a skyscraper, some 400ft above UB City, the business district of Bengaluru, previously called Bangalore.
The building has been described as the billionaire home it was built to be.
According to reports, Mallya has never
seen the finished structure in person.
It is also reported that the Indian government is trying to get him to face charges of financial crimes.
Mallya fled India in 2016 after he defaulted on debts worth more than $1 billion. He is also facing fraud charges.
He was accused of defrauding a consortium of national banks, while diamond magnate Nirav Modi was accused of defrauding the state-owned Punjab National Bank.
As a result of this, both of them fled the country.
Now, Mallya, who made his fortune with the popular Kingfisher brand of beer as well as Formula 1 and aviation, has taken refuge in the UK.
There he remains despite efforts by India to extradite him.
Irfan Razack, the chairman of Prestige Estates Projects which is part of the joint project to construct the tower, spoke about the challenges they have faced in its construction.
He said: “It was a challenge to construct the mansion on a huge cantilever at that height, but we have ensured we built it exactly the way it was conceived. It’s a complex structure and the finishing work is going on.
“We will finish the project as per contract and hand it over.”
However, Mallya may never be able to return to India to claim the ‘sky mansion’.
In 2022, the so-called “king of good times” was handed a jail sentence of four months for disobeying an earlier court judgement regarding the collapse of his airline, Kingfisher Airlines.
The airline had been India’s largest domestic carrier before its collapse.
Mallya will have to be extradited to India to face the sentence, as well as the fraud charges.
Speaking on the case, UK Minister of State Security, Tom Tugendhat said he does not want the UK to become somewhere people can evade justice.
“We (the UK and India) both have legal processes that must be gone through. But the UK government is absolutely clear, we have no intention of becoming a place where those who are seeking to evade justice can hide.”
The sky mansion has in the meantime, remained unoccupied.
