Netflix banned from showing ‘Bad Boy Billionaires’ about scandal-hit Indian tycoons

Four billionaires are featured in the series including Vijay Mallya and Nirav Modi, who are both in London fighting extradition

Netflix has been banned from airing Bad Boy Billionaires, a documentary series featuring scandal-hit Indian tycoons.

The four-part series, which looks at the activities of the allegedly disgraced billionaires Vijay Mallya, Nirav Modi, Subrata Roy and Ramalinga Raju, was due to hit screens on Wednesday.

But Netflix’s last-minute bid to overturn a court injunction by Mr Roy at India’s Supreme Court failed on Wednesday.

Mr Roy, who founded India’s multibillion-dollar Sahara India Pariwar conglomerate and spent two years in prison, had secured an order in the country’s lower court against the streaming service using his name.

Subrata Roy was jailed in March after he failed to turn up to a hearing amid a supreme court battle with the Securities and Exchange Board of India, the capital markets regulator. Prashanth Vishwanathan / Bloomberg

The Supreme Court has now ordered Netflix to take its case back to the lower court.

In a separate case Mr Raju, whose software company Satyam was behind a $1.5 billion (Dh5.5bn) accounting scandal, has also been successful in his effort to stay the show's release.

Netflix, which declined to comment, has removed the trailer for Bad Boy Billionaires: India from its site.

It had been billed as an “investigative docuseries [that] explores the greed, fraud and corruption that built up – and ultimately brought down – India’s most infamous tycoons”.

It includes business tycoon Mr Mallya and jeweller Mr Modi, who are both in London fighting extradition to India to face fraud charges.

Diamond magnate Nirav Modi at his office in Mumbai in 2016. Photo: Getty Images

Mr Mallya, 64, is accused of defaulting on $1.3bn in loans for his failing airline Kingfisher, which shut down in 2012. He has allegedly refused to repay the loans despite having the money to do so.

The businessman fled to Britain in 2016 as a consortium of 17 banks accused him of financial wrongdoing. He was arrested the next year, starting the long extradition process.

Mr Mallya was accused of pumping the loans intended for the ailing airline into two vanity projects including his Formula One team and a corporate jet, according to a 2018 court ruling.

Mr Modi, whose jewels adorned celebrities including actresses Kate Winslet and Priyanka Chopra Jonas, remains in a British jail as he battles extradition to India, accused of a money-laundering and fraud operation worth nearly $2bn.

The jeweller was arrested in March last year after spending 15 months on the run after he and his uncle Mehul Choksi were accused for fraudulently securing guarantees from Punjab National Bank from corrupt staff in Mumbai, which were then used to obtain loans from abroad.

Mr Roy founded and chaired Sahara India Pariwar, which once owned the Grosvenor House Hotel in London and the Plaza Hotel in New York. Sahara once sponsored the Indian cricket team for a decade and owned a stake in a Formula One racing team.

He was jailed for two years for contempt of court in connection with a $4bn convertible bond case.

The group allegedly failed to repay billions of dollars to investors after bonds Sahara sold to them were later ruled to be illegal.

Mr Raju was sentenced to seven years in jail for falsifying accounts at software company Satyam Computer Services in a $1.5bn fraud.

Satyam's stock rapidly fell by almost 90 per cent soon after Mr Raju's revelations.