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Vijay Mallya gets bail till April 2, lawyer raises doubts over Indian documents
Vijay Mallya’s lawyer said many statements of police officers submitted in courts were unreliable, and the CBI had failed to present supporting evidence to the charges against the businessman.
Serious doubts were expressed on Thursday on the quality of documents submitted by India in the Vijay Mallya extradition case in the Westminster magistrates’ court, as the judge gave the tycoon bail until April 2.
Claire Montgomery, appearing for Mallya, laid into the material submitted by India against him, and cited rulings by Indian courts and the Law Commission to claim that many statements of police officers submitted in courts were unreliable.
No date was set for the next hearing, but is expected to be in the next three weeks, when Mark Summers, representing India, will seek to refute Montgomery's claims about the quality and admissibility of evidence submitted.
According to Montgomery, since the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) is allegedly used in political cases, the behaviour of its officers was not reliable and they had failed to present supporting evidence to their charges against Mallya.
She particularly picked several holes in 12 witness statements submitted by India and said they had identical spelling mistakes, unintelligible passages, and repeated parts verbatim.
"They seem to be someone else's assertions... there seems to be a preconceived desire to blame the applicant when no evidence existed," she said and added that parts were repeated in a cut-and-paste manner in the statements.
Chief magistrate Emma Arbuthnot will rule on the admissibility of the documents after submission by Summers at the next hearing.
