Last Nizam (9781742626109) (39 page)

Shortly after his sacking Javeri was evicted from the Taj Residency. When the Nizam's Private Estate refused to immediately clear a 1.6-million-rupee bill for five years' room rental, the Taj obtained a court injunction and sealed the suite. Humiliated, Javeri hit back where it would hurt the most. He called in the A$2.3 million loan he had extended to Murchison House Pastoral Company in 1992. The loan was secured against the company's only remaining assets, the chattels of Havelock House and Murchison House Station.

David Michael still maintains Javeri never lent any of his personal funds to Jah as ‘all of the money was the proceeds from the valuables that Mukarram Jah put on the table in Geneva'. He also claims that Jah was duped into putting the money from the jewellery sales into Javeri's family company to obtain ‘Forex import credits'. But Michael admits his boss's aversion to involving himself in financial matters was partly to blame for the mess. The moment discussions began on transferring money Jah ‘immediately shut off', Michael says. ‘He did not even wish to hear such convoluted things. He could not, or did not, want to understand such matters.' Michael even claims Jah was misled into believing that Kingsburg was his own company.
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In the spring of 1995, Perth's largest auction house, Gregsons, received instructions from Kingsburg to conduct a mortgagee auction. In the 40-odd years Bob Gregson had been working with his family company he had never handled a sale this size. Almost 600 lots, ranging from a child's pair of sequinned slippers to a Holland & Holland Royal Grade double-barrel elephant gun, were up for sale. The 54-page catalogue listed the entire contents of Havelock House, including Jah's prayer cap, a painting by his Turkish grandfather, a 1909 child-sized model of a horse and cart, dozens of books, family photographs, curtains and chandeliers, as well as a 442-piece Mappin and Webb ivoryhandled silver cutlery service. The sale attracted international attention. Jah, who was in London, found out about the auction only three days before it was held. It was David Michael who spotted an advertisement placed in
The Times
announcing an auction of ‘The chattels of the Nazim [sic] of Hyderabad' to be held on 1 December 1995.
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Short of paying Javeri the money he owed him, Jah could do nothing to stop the court-ordered disposal of his personal possessions. But he did ask his old friend, Ayoob Khan, Pakistan's Consul General in Perth, to withdraw from sale several items of religious
and personal value including the prayer cap, a silver tray given to Jah on his fiftieth birthday, an Asaf Jahi flag, and a book,
Best Loved Cars of the World.
‘There was also a chess set there. I wanted to buy it and give it him because I knew he was fond of it,' says Khan. ‘But he told me: “Don't buy it. Once it's gone, it's gone.”'
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Gregson says he heard a rumour that Jah was among the 500 people who crammed the Beaufort Street rooms because he ‘was worried about the bag with his togs in it'.
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In truth, however, Jah had stayed away as buyers put in bids ranging from A$10 for a pair of damaged pink and milk glass dishes to A$112,000 for the elephant gun. ‘There were people bidding twenty dollars for my towels,' says Jah incredulously.
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Today, Lot No. 526, Abdul Mejid's oil painting of a deer running through the snow, is one of the few items Jah managed to salvage from the sale. It was purchased by Javeri for A$3200 and presented to Jah as a belated peace offering by his wife in 2001. Hundreds of other lots purchased by Javeri at the auction are stored in a Perth warehouse awaiting a final resolution of litigation still being carried on by Scheherazade. Most of Jah's precious family memorabilia is not among it. Though many of the items had gone beyond their estimated value, the A$985,000 raised by the auction was well short of what Javeri was owed. Jah was now down to his last asset and the one that he coveted the most: his half-million acres of bush, barbed wire, blowflies and dust.

But there were to be several more apocryphal twists to the tale before the fate of Murchison House Station was finally decided. On 17 November 1995, page 13 of
The Deccan Chronicle
carried a lengthy report that the Ministry of Home Affairs was probing allegations that Javeri had smuggled one billion rupees' worth of antiques out of the country over the past five years. On the same page was another report, without a byline or a dateline, going into great detail about Javeri's affairs in Switzerland. The article alleged that a Geneva court had sentenced Javeri to two months'
imprisonment in September 1994 after he had been declared bankrupt and found guilty of misappropriating 2.5 million Swiss francs. The article said that Javeri had told the prosecutor's office in December 1993 that ‘he worked for an Indian prince as chief advisor. For all his business he received a commission for the work done by him'. Because of the ‘precarious political situation in India and the global economic crisis' the prince had not been able to recover the proceedings of asset sales and had not paid the commission due to Javeri.
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The story turned out to be a crude attempt to undermine Javeri's credibility. A few weeks later came the grovelling, misspelt apology. ‘The article in
Deccan Chronicle
“Javeri Lives Like a Prince as the Prince Goes Pauper” was based on materials make [sic] awarable [sic] to is [sic] by sources close to the prince. It was not our intension [sic] to malign the reputation of Mr Javeri.'
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Now it was Javeri's turn to go on the offensive. In December Javeri wrote to the Home Minister, Y. B. Chavan, and Hyderabad's police commissioner welcoming an inquiry into the affairs of the Nizam and his private estate. Javeri claimed that when he took over, ‘the palaces were in a dilapidated and neglected condition' and most of the antiques and artefacts had already disappeared. Javeri then went on to accuse Jah's General Power of Attorney, Asadullah Khan, as being ‘probably one of the persons who during the last 27 years was responsible for the removal and disposal of the antiques from the palaces'. Javeri alleged that following his own dismissal the administration of palaces had been entrusted to the Taj Group ‘without taking any inventories, exchange of documents or any form of agreement'. It was an ‘irrational action on the part of the Nizam under the advice of his so-called close advisors who were keen to remove him, so as to continue looting the remaining artefacts and properties'.
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The tit-for-tat over who was robbing whom suddenly got nastier. Acting on a tip-off from a Hyderabadi jeweller, police
raided Javeri's Jubilee Hills house, where they seized ‘antiques, diamond jewellery, ivory and marble statues, gem-studded daggers and champagne and cognac bottles'. The police also seized an unregistered 1883 Colt gun. Javeri, who police said ‘was absconding', was booked under the Prohibition Act, the Antiquities Act and the Indian Arms Act.
Newstime
quoted customs officials as saying the antique pieces were worth 100 million rupees, but could fetch more on the international market ‘if they had the Nizam's name tag attached to them'.
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Javeri, who was in Delhi at the time, issued a statement denying any wrongdoing and pointed the finger at Jah's coterie: ‘The raid was part of a deep conspiracy hatched by the “sycophants” surrounding Prince Mukarram Jah,' he told the
Pioneer
newspaper. ‘The police action was nothing less than the misuse of police force by some vested interest.'
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Javeri would be vindicated when the Andhra Pradesh Court ruled in October 1997 that the police raid was a violation of his fundamental rights and ordered the state government to pay 500,000 rupees in compensation. Javeri would also be vindicated on another score. His warning to Jah that he would regret the Taj hotel deal had been remarkably prescient.

In January 1996 Jah flew from Perth to Hyderabad to host his customary Iftar party. But when he tried to enter the Chowmahalla palace, Taj security guards blocked his way. Never before had a Nizam been barred from entering one of his properties – even during the days when the British Resident virtually controlled the state. The Indian Government dared not interfere with the Seventh Nizam's ancestral rights even after invading his state with three army divisions. Now a bunch of hoteliers were telling him where the Eighth and last Nizam of Hyderabad could and could not go.

Jah had appointed the Taj Group to manage his private estate following Javeri's sacking the previous May. The Taj hired one
of its executives as the administrator of the estate, put its own personnel in charge of security at the five palaces still owned by Jah, drew up an inventory of his assets and began untangling the accounts. Three months later it sent Jah a bill for 18 million rupees. When Jah refused to clear the bill, the Taj obtained a court order to secure possession of the properties until the account was paid. Jah's officials responded by issuing notices to the group to vacate the property and withdraw its security personnel. The Taj went to the High Court, where it got an injunction barring the prince from entering the Chowmahalla and Falaknuma palaces. Stung by the publicity surrounding the Iftar affair, the Taj Group backtracked slightly, saying the entire episode was a ‘misunderstanding'. Jah was still the owner of the palaces and everything could remain open for him provided he gave them ‘advance warning he was coming', a company spokesman said.
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But the Taj was not the only party to deny Jah access to his ancestral property. In May, Jah's third wife Manolya Onur obtained a court order sealing all 44 rooms of the Chiraan palace. Onur alleged that her ex-husband had stopped maintenance payments to her and their daughter Niloufer, now aged five. She also alleged that Jah owed her US$250,000 plus interest that he had borrowed in 1989 before they married, and the return of a US$70,000 dowry. Niloufer, she told the court, was the legal heir of the Chiraan palace and the Cedars summer palace at Ootacamund. The court later agreed to allow all but 20 of the rooms to be reopened after a petition was filed by the Nizam's Private Estate. To add insult to injury, Onur then vented her anger in an 11-page tell-all interview to the mass-circulation Bombay magazine
Savvy
, which specialises in exposing the seamy side of Bollywood. The problems of the past few years, she concluded, had made her decide to become a ‘feminist'.
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One week after the Andhra Pradesh High Court issued an
order restraining Jah's staff from removing any items from Chiraan, Western Australia's Supreme Court put Murchison House Pastoral Company into liquidation. The Company's directors, Howell and Tilden, had appointed Maurice Lyford as provisional liquidator on 1 April 1996, after Javeri had served statutory demands of A$1,629,700, being the balance of the A$2.3 million it had loaned to Murchison House Pastoral in December 1992, and A$263,675, being the amount owed to Shanaz. Howell had tried unsuccessfully to have the demands set aside on the basis that no actual loan agreement existed. After taking evidence from both parties in the dispute, the Supreme Court ruled on 5 June that Howell's evidence was ‘ambiguous and unconvincing' and ‘substantial sums' were owed to Javeri's companies.
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In March 1997, Colliers Jardine placed advertisements in Perth newspapers announcing the auction on 18 May of a ‘superbly located property in the south western segment of the pastoral area of Western Australia known as the Western Murchison or Lower Shark Bay'. There was no mention of the 300 kilometres of dirt tracks that Jah had carved out of the bush or of the mostly broken-down dozers, tanks, trucks and Toyota four-wheel drives scattered around the homestead. Instead, the real-estate company's write-up said Murchison House Station ‘was developed to an almost complete state and historically was capable of supporting reasonable stock numbers'. In pastoral terms it was ‘held in high regard particularly for its reliable rainfall and proximity to markets'. Tourism development was ‘well worth future investigation, particularly when considering the aesthetic of the property's vast ocean frontage, its accommodation and water availability'.
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Colliers Jardine said it had been ‘inundated with calls from prospective buyers'.
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The rains that usually arrive by the end of April are enough to turn the parched valley of the Murchison a lush green, but in the autumn of 1997 the station wore a neglected look. There was
little to show for the millions of dollars Jah had spent on the farm over the past quarter of a century. Sheep numbers were down to 2000, or just one-fifth of the station's potential carrying capacity. The bush had started to reclaim many of Jah's tracks and to smother his fences. The water in the swimming pool was beginning to turn green. Of the original workers only old Cess Blood was left as a de facto caretaker. Jah had given him an unregistered 4WD Toyota with no brakes, windscreen or starter motor and set him up in a camp on the northern outskirts of the property near an old World War II landing strip. Blood was on a pension, got free meat and didn't mind the isolation, though he could have used the several months of back pay that he was owed. ‘We knew about the money getting short. I used to get a couple of hundred a week in cash and then that stopped. Then the manager's pay stopped and that was about it,' says Blood, who now lives in a one-room retirement flat in Northampton.
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Jah might have lost the court battle to save Murchison Station Pastoral Company from going into liquidation, but he had not given up hope of somehow hanging on to the property and foiling Javeri's designs. His Perth-based lawyer, Grantham Kitto, told
The West Australian
that his client had made improvements over the years amounting to A$5 million and on that basis it was ‘highly likely we will try to prevent creditors associated with Javeri receiving any of the proceeds from the auction'. Lyford, the court-appointed liquidator, told the paper that Jah was not disputing the auction and might even turn up and bid. ‘Anything is possible in this scenario. The company has been into liquidation before and came out of it at the eleventh hour.'
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