Netflix India on Monday released three out of four episodes of the controversial documentary series Bad Boy Billionaires. The series was scheduled to be released on September 2, but was embroiled in a legal tussle after subjects Subrata Roy, B Ramalinga Raju and Mehul Choksi moved court seeking a stay on the release.
The web series was promoted by Netflix as an "investigative docuseries" that "explores the greed, fraud and corruption that built up - and ultimately brought down - Indias most infamous tycoons."
The documentary is based on the lives of liquor baron Vijay Mallya, diamantaire Nirav Modi, Sahara India Group chief Subrata Roy and Satyam founder Ramalinga Raju. All episodes except the one on Ramalinga Raju have been released.
Mehul Choksi had filed a plea at the Delhi High Court against the documentary being released, and asked for a pre-screening of the documentary, which was dismissed. Choksi has challenged this, and it will come up on October 13.
Subrata Roy had also filed a plea at a court in Bihar stating that the series aims to malign his public image. The court reportedly vacated the stay on the documentary's release on Saturday, after which the series was released.
Reuters reported that Netflix had argued that halting the show's release "freezes free speech" as well as financially hurts the company.
In Ramalinga Raju’s case, a Hyderabad local civil court had issued an interim stay restraining Netflix from airing the series a day before its release. This stay is yet to be vacated, and the matter will reportedly come up for hearing later on Monday.
Ramalinga Raju was convicted in the multi-crore accounting scandal of Satyam Computer Services Limited. In his plea, he had alleged that the series would infringe his rights of fair-trial and privacy, besides defaming and tarnishing his image across nations.
In April 2015, the Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate's Court (ACMM) had awarded seven-year rigorous imprisonment to Ramalinga Raju and nine others in the over Rs 7,000-crore accounting fraud in the erstwhile IT firm which came to light in 2009. The ACMM court, which tried the Satyam case probed by CBI, had sentenced Raju and others to rigorous imprisonment for criminal conspiracy and cheating among other offences.
In May 2015, a metropolitan sessions court here granted bail to Ramalinga Raju and nine others and suspended their seven-year rigorous imprisonment sentence after they filed appeals.