Unlike in the past when there used to be very few or no takers for his properties at earlier auctions, as many as six properties of fugitive gangster Dawood Ibrahim in his ancestral village of Mumbake in Khed taluka of Ratnagiri district in coastal Konkan region were sold by the Union Government at an e-auction organised under the the Smugglers and Foreign Exchange Manipulators (Forfeiture of Property) Act (SAFEMA), 1976, on Tuesday.
The six properties were sold for a collective amount of Rs 22.68 lakh in the scheduled online, offline and sealed tender auction held here. While lawyer Ajay Shrivastava bought two properties, a Supreme Court advocate Bhupendra Bhardwaj picked up Dawood’s four other assets.
Of the six properties, a 27-guntha land parcel (survey no 181) which houses a two-storey bungalow and two houses fetched a price of 11.20 lakh at the auction, as against its base price of Rs 5.35 lakh. The bid was won by Ajay Shrivastav.
Shrivatsava also walked away with Dawood’s another property -- a 24.90-gunta land parcel (survey number 153) at Mumbake village in Khed taluka for Rs 4.30 lakh as against the reserved price of Rs 1. 89 lakh.
Another buyer Bhardwaj bought four land parcels --20 guntas of land kept for a reserve price of Rs 1.52 lakh (survey number 150), 27 guntas of kept for a reserve price of Rs 2.05 lakh (survey number 151), 29.30 guntas of land with a base price of Rs 2.23 lakh (survey number 152) and 18 guntas of land with a reserved price tag of Rs 1.38 lakh (survey number 155) for a collective price of Rs 7.18 lakh.
However, one more property – which was among the seven properties slated for auction – was withdrawn at the last moment due to a technical error. This property housed a petrol pump and other buildings at Lote in Khed taluka. The authorities had kept a base price of Rs 61.48 lakh for this property.
Similarly, two flats of Dawood’s former aide Iqbal Memon alias Iqbal Mirchi (nos 501 and 502) in Milton Apartments on Juhu Tara Road in Santacruz (West) in north-west Mumbai remained unsold despite many enquiries for these two prime properties. Talking to media persons after the auction, Additional Commissioner (Income Tax) R N Souza said: “The auction was a success. We got an excellent response for the auction. The six properties at Ratnagiri have been successfully sold. Four bids were won by and two others were bagged by Shrivastava”. Competent Authority Hari Govind Singh supervised the auction.
According to official sources, the Union Finance Ministry had in all planned to sell at least properties of Dawood in the first half of the year. However, the authorities could not meet the target owing to the lockdown restrictions.
There have been at least half a dozen occasions in the past w3hen the Centre has made an effort to auction the properties belonging to Dawood which were attached by various agencies after the 1993 Mumbai serial blasts, in which the underworld don is one of the absconding accused.
There are at least 50 benami properties in Mumbai. Dawood’s younger sister Haseena Ibrahim Parkar used to take care of several of these properties till she passed away on July 6, 2014.
It may be recalled that while the TADA court attached 8 eight properties of Dawood in the nineties following his involvement in March 12,1993 Mumbai serial blasts, the IT department attached the remaining 15 properties subsequently.
Though the IT department had put 23 properties for an auction in March 2001 after it failed to recover the tax dues for assessment years from 1991–1992 to 1995– 1996, there are more than equal number benami properties which still remain unattached in Mumbai.
Delhi-based lawyer Ajay Srivatsava was incidentally the only brave one to have bid for one of Dawood’s properties when they were put up for a public auction in a Colaba hotel in south Mumbai on March 28,2001.
Incidentally, Srivatsava had to wage prolonged litigation against Dawood Ibrahim’s Mumbai family members, before the Mumbai Small Causes Court in the first week of March 2011 directed Haseena Parkar to hand over the purchased property –a shed admeasuring 297 sq feet that is located at Industrial gala no 32 at Tardeo in south Mumbai -- to him within three months.