Having paid part of his airline's Rs 287 crore dues to the Airports Authority of India (AAI), liquor baron Vijay Mallya today said Kingfisher Airlines and the state-owned airport body had worked out a "mutually satisfactory" arrangement on the issue.
"I do not run Kingfisher Airlines through media. We have bilateral arrangements with AAI and have come to a mutually satisfactory arrangement with them," he said in a statement, days after submitting cheques to AAI.
Mallya, who would participate in a conference here tomorrow, along with his Jet Airways counterpart Naresh Goyal and Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel, has paid Rs 50 crore to AAI and promised to pay another Rs 150 crore over the next two months to clear the dues worth Rs 286.62 crore.
The payments were made in the face of AAI threats to encash its bank guarantee to recover the dues, which constitute charges for parking, landing, navigation, communication and various other services AAI provides to the airlines.
On his recent statement that several foreign carriers had shown interest in acquiring stake in the Kingfisher Airlines, he said he could not comment on the issue as the government did not have a policy to allow foreign carriers to pick shares in an Indian airline.
Mallya has been lobbying hard to convince the government to change its policy and allow foreign carriers to pick stake in Indian airline companies.