Jet Airways owes an undisputed sum of Rs 15,400 crore to creditors out of which Rs 1,254 crore is owed to employees
Jet Airways promoter Naresh Goyal diverted Rs 9.46 crores out of a loan granted by Canara Bank to the airline to his wife, son and daughter, from 2011-12 till 2018-19, a remand application filed by the Enforcement Directorate said.
Another Rs 1,152 crore was siphoned off as consultancy expense during those five years and salary expense of Goyal’s residential staff at Delhi and Mumbai was being borne by Jet Airways.
ED also said that Goyal diverted Rs 2,547 crore showing a payment to its subsidiary JetLite and then wrote off the amount.
The central agency on Friday night arrested Goyal and today produced him before a PMLA court in Mumbai.
Amit Agarwal, then Chief Financial Officer of the company told ED during interrogations that these payments were directly approved by Goyal himself. “On being asked by the CFO, Naresh Goyal authoritatively replied that these payments were critical for the functioning of the company and there was no point in asking further questions,” the ED said.
“As per the CFO, the finance department had no say about these payments and it was directly approved by Goyal through his secretary,” the agency added.
A consortium led by State Bank of India of which Canara Bank is part owes Rs 6,000 crore to the airline which has now been marked as Non-Performing Asset (NPA) after the airline shut business in 2019.
Lenders will lose 95% haircut on the recovery of the amount if a consortium manages to restart the airline.
The Jalan-Kalrock consortium won the mandate to restart the airline in June 2021 but since then has been locked in a legal battle with the banks.
In 2019, the banks had appointed consultancy firm EY to conduct a forensic audit of the airline’s account. According to the audit report, expenses
