New Delhi: The Finance Ministry has told the Central Information Commission (CIC) that it is not aware of the loans given to industrialist Vijay Mallya, to tell the transparency panel that the response is “vague and not sustainable as per law.
The Chief Information Commissioner RK Mathur, while hearing the case of Rajiv Kumar Khare, told the Finance Ministry official that the Right to Information (RTI) filed by the applicant should be handed over to the appropriate Public Authority. The Ministry of Finance has claimed that there is no information about the loans sanctioned by various banks in the Ministry or details of the guarantee given by Mr. Mallya against those loans, but the Ministry has responded to questions in Parliament in this regard in the past.
In the year 2009, a loan of Rs 8,040 crore was declared non-performing asset (NPA) and NPA was restructured in 2010, he said. That during a debate about the performance in the upper house on 17th November, 2016, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley had called the debt issue of Mr. Mallya a “terrible legacy”, which the NDA government inherited from the previous UPA regime. But as Mr. Khare failed to answer the RTI application from the Finance Ministry, he approached the CIC for seeking information of Mr. Mallya’s loans.
Under the RTI Act, the word “information” means any record which is under or under the control of the public authority. Initially, the Ministry had informed that the information regarding the loan on Mallya’s could not be given due to the rules of relaxation in the RTI Act related to personal safety and adverse effects on the economic interests of the state.
The Defendant (official of the Ministry of Finance) further said that this information was not available with the Ministry, he said that the information sought by the appellant may be available to the concerned Bank or the Reserve Bank of India” Chief Information Commissioner. He instructed the Ministry to transfer the application to the Public Authority which organized the information.
