Last Nizam (9781742626109) (37 page)

The interest was unprecedented. Between 6 and 9 March 1978, representatives of Bulgari of Rome, Jean Rosenthal of Paris, Harry Winston of New York and other leading jewellers from
overseas came to Bombay to inspect the collection and make their bids. Referring to the Colombian emeralds, Herbert Rosenthal told
India Today
magazine: ‘As a judge of precious stones for over 50 years, I have never seen such wonderful emeralds. For their quality and their brightness the ensemble present in the sale is exquisite. Simply out of this world.'
¹³
Bidders were required to make a US$26.3 million deposit before they could participate, making it the most expensive jewellery auction ever held.

Just before the auction was due to start, however, one of the beneficiaries, Moazzam Jah's daughter, Fatima Fauzia, filed a case in the Hyderabad City Civil Court that the trustees were not in agreement on the sale and there was insufficient publicity to ensure the heirs got the best price. The money was needed, she argued, to raise cash for the heirs of the Nizam and pay off taxes that the government had levied on the Nizam's wealth. One of the heirs, she told the court, was scraping a living on a few rupees a day in the slums of Old Delhi. The case went to the Andhra Pradesh High Court, which dismissed Fauzia's petition and in a bizarre decision granted permission to a Bangalore businessman, Peter Fernandez, to purchase the lot for 202 million rupees (A$17.7 million).

The decision caused a furore in India and abroad. Two Indian jewellery firms petitioned the Supreme Court to restrain the sale. A three-judge bench then took the unprecedented decision of directing that the jewellery be sold by open auction to be conducted in the premises of the Supreme Court itself on 20 September 1979. By now only two of the original prospective bidders remained, Greek shipping magnate Stavros Niarchos and Dubai-based banker Abdul Wahab Galahari, who said he was acting for a client described only as a ‘fabulously wealthy sheikh of the United Arab Emirates'.
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Each man had paid a A$23 million deposit as a bid for the jewels, which were to be sold in a single lot. The Government of India gave permission for all 37 pieces to be exported from India.

The auction never took place. The government changed its mind and filed an eleventh-hour application seeking a stay on the auction on the grounds that the jewels were ‘art treasures' and it was in the national interest that they not be taken out of the country. The Supreme Court rejected the government's petition, but for Niarchos and Galahari it was the last straw. Demanding their deposits back, both bidders withdrew.

Jah had been watching the developments closely. He stood to gain around three-fifths of the proceeds from the sale of jewellery held in the trusts. His brother Muffakham was entitled to an eighth, with the remainder to be divided among a rapidly increasing number of other beneficiaries claiming to be descendants of the Seventh Nizam. For now, however, the fate of the jewels was placed once again in the hands of a government committee, this time headed by respected art historian Pupul Jayakar. Based on the committee's recommendation a notification for the ‘compulsory acquisition' of 173 items from the three jewellery trusts was issued. Muffakham challenged the notification in the Supreme Court and demanded the right to auction them to the highest bidder and export them if the successful bidder wished to do so.

As Muffakham's petition languished in the courts, the Government of India set up yet another committee comprising eminent historians and jewellers, which recommended that the jewels should be acquired through a process of negotiation with the trustees. The man entrusted with the task of valuing the 173 pieces chosen by the committee was Jayant Chowlera. As a jeweller and valuer, Chowlera had impeccable credentials. His family had been in the business for three generations and he had personally valued the jewellery of the maharajahs of Jaipur, Gwalior, Mysore and Kashmir. ‘I have probably handled more jewellery in terms of value than anyone else in the world,' Chowlera says with some justification.
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Chowlera valued the 173 pieces at 389 million rupees, but added that once a historical value was assigned to them, their worth would double or even triple. Even allowing for such a margin, however, Chowlera's valuation was a fraction of the A$250 to A$300 million (6 to 7.7 billion rupees) that Sotheby's and Christie's were estimating the jewels would fetch on the open market.

With such a wide gap between what the Government of India might be willing to pay and what the trustees knew the jewels were really worth, the matter went for arbitration. Justice A. N. Sen was chosen as the sole arbitrator and in July 1991 made an award fixing a value of 2.25 billion rupees. The government was given eight weeks to make up its mind whether to purchase the jewels in part or in full. If it failed to do so, the trustees would be free to sell them. The government again procrastinated and filed a petition seeking a review of the award and the value set by Sen. The matter crept through the courts for another two years, during which time it was discovered that a typographical error had caused a 400-million-rupee blow-out in Sen's original award. Finally, in July 1993, the government agreed to purchase the entire collection for 1.8 billion rupees in six staggered payments.

This time, however, it was the turn of the trustees to raise objections. They took issue with the payment being made in instalments and refused to hand over the jewellery until the money had been paid in full. On 20 October 1994 the Supreme Court instructed the government to pay the amount agreed to as a lump sum with interest calculated from the date of the original award in 1991. The deadline for the payment of the 2.18 billion rupees (A$87 million) was set for 31 December 1994. When the government pleaded that the money would not be available until the new year, an extension was granted until 16 January.

After 23 years of high drama mixed with farce, it appeared the final curtain was about to fall, with everything looking set for a
smooth transfer. The tragicomedy of the Nizam's jewels, however, had several more acts to go. As Chowlera and the government team arrived at the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank on 10 January, they were met by officers of the Income Tax Department from Hyderabad. The government representatives were told that prohibitory orders had been placed on the lockers housing the jewels and the orders would not be lifted until full payment of the trustees' tax liabilities had been made. With only six days to go before the deadline expired and the government would lose its right to acquire the jewels, frantic negotiations ensued. An offer to pay the tax arrears as soon as the Government of India handed over its bank draft was rejected. Only when the trustees paid a 300-million-rupee deposit to the Tax Department was the handover allowed to proceed.

An
India Today
reporter who witnessed the ceremony said that a hush descended on the people crowded around the room of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank as the jewels were taken out of three steel trunks. ‘The unspeakable lustre and exquisite craftsmanship of the Asaf Jahi rubies, emeralds and diamonds commanded awe and admiration. As the item-by-item inspection began, Jayant Chowlera, the Government's valuer, picked up the sparkling Jacob diamond and touched his forehead with it reverentially.'
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Twenty years later, seated in his small and sparsely decorated 700-rupee-a-month apartment, a block behind Bombay's Chowpatty Beach, Chowlera remembers the day clearly. ‘Every time I handled the jewels I felt I was becoming one with the Goddess Lakshmi. It was such a beautiful collection.' The most important thing was not what the government had paid for the collection, but the fact that it now belonged to the people of India. ‘Let it be a treasure, don't calculate it in terms of what it could be worth.'
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Not all the beneficiaries, however, felt that way. Rather than settling all outstanding disputes over the inheritance of the late
Nizam, the settlement reignited them. As the trustees began the cumbersome task of distributing the sale proceeds, hundreds of people claiming to be descendants of the late Nizam's harem began devising ways of getting their hands on a share of the money. Under the terms of the Trust Deed, Jah was to receive 273 million rupees of the 2.18 billion rupees as the son of Azam Jah. A further 537 million rupees was to be paid to him as the legal heir of his uncle, aunt and paternal uncle. The 537-million-rupee bonus was built into the Trust Deed when it was drawn up in 1951. Still nurturing visions of his dynasty surviving for a few more generations, Osman Ali Khan wanted the money to be used by his ‘eldest male descendant' to enable him ‘as the Head of the Family of the Settler to maintain the dignity of the House of Asaf Jah to which the Settler belongs and the status and position of various members of his family'.
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While there was no question that Jah was the eldest male descendant, none of his relatives seemed to have any faith in his ability to maintain the dignity of the House of Asaf Jah or protect the status and position of his relatives. In the 18 years that had elapsed since he had been made the Eighth Nizam, Jah had turned his back on Hyderabad, spending less and less time in the city. The legacy of the Asaf Jahi dynasty was in tatters. The palaces had been stripped of their valuables and squatters camped in their courtyards. Family heirlooms were turning up in Bombay antique shops and in the catalogues of Christie's auctioneers. His relatives had turned against him and Hyderabad's courts were crammed with cases filed by people claiming their share of his inheritance.

Now Jah's eldest son, Azmat, and his daughter, Shekhyar, joined the queue. Declaring their father to be ‘mentally incompetent' and incapable of managing his finances, they filed a case in the Supreme Court for a stay on his share of the proceeds from the jewellery sale.

A
FTER BEING RULED BY
Muslims for two and a half centuries, the people of Andhra Pradesh went to the other extreme in 1982, voting in an ex-movie star who had played avatars of the Hindu god Vishnu in Telegu-language movies. N. T. Rama Rao proved to be a better actor than a politician and was tossed out in the next election, but in 1994 he stormed back to power promising to introduce two-rupee-a-kilo rice and prohibition. Andhra Pradesh became known as a ‘dry state'. The number of deaths from illegally produced moonshine soared, as did the size of the black market in smuggled liquor. Meanwhile, the state exchequer went broke subsidising cheap rice while losing out on liquor excise.

Sadruddin Javeri was fond of Johnny Walker Black Label. Like everyone in Hyderabad with money and the right connections, he found ways of keeping the booze cabinet in his Banjara Hills home well stocked. It was August 1998. Javeri was agitated and needed something strong to settle his nerves. It had been another frustrating day trying to nail down the 500,000 rupees compensation the High Court had ordered after a botched police raid on his home in 1996 that he accused Jah's coterie of instigating. ‘He ruined me in the five years that I worked for him. Now
I just want to be left alone.'
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Four years later Javeri would be dead, the victim of a heart attack his wife Scheherazade attributes to the stress of trying to recover the money she claims Jah still owes them.

Today, Jah feels little sympathy for his former friend and business partner. Javeri's name has become synonymous in Jah's current circle of friends, lawyers and advisors with everything that went wrong in the 1990s. Jah refers to him as a
badmash
, an Urdu word that encapsulates someone who is a villain, a bandit and a scoundrel. There are very few people who will stick up for Javeri in Hyderabad today. Most of the mud thrown at him by Jah's supporters over the years has stuck. In the very public falling out between the two men it was Javeri's reputation that went under first, even though Jah's fall from grace, shortly afterwards, was greater.

In August 1990, however, Javeri seemed to Jah to be his only hope. Thirteen years after they had parted ways over his marriage to Helen, he picked up the phone and rang his former advisor. ‘He told me: “I'm cleaned out, bankrupt. All I have is 15,000 rupees, help me out,” ' Javeri would later recall.
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David Michael vehemently denies that Jah was ever in such dire straights. According to Michael, Sadruddin Javeri's father, Hashim Ali Javeri, contacted Jah's General Power of Attorney, Asadullah Khan, begging that his son be given a job in the Nizam's Private Estate. ‘It was Sadruddin, not Jah, who needed the money,' Michael alleges. ‘Sadruddin Javeri was a notorious and serial bankrupt who had a very smooth tongue. He had to his credit a bankrupt jewellery store in Bond Street, London, that was listed in the
Guinness Book of World Records
as the largest uninsured and unsolved jewellery heist in the world.'
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Jah maintains that he acted out of loyalty in reappointing Sadruddin. ‘I felt I owed a debt of gratitude to Hashim Ali, as it was he who asked me.'
⁴

Whatever the truth of the matter, the die was cast. Javeri was appointed as principal advisor and chairman of the Nizam's Private Estate and given carte blanche to look into and if possible fix up every aspect of Jah's private and financial affairs. ‘He got the top job, including a letter of appointment that allowed him to overrule the decisions of the General Power of Attorney,' explains Michael. ‘This is what Sadruddin Javeri wanted, since he could hide behind the facade, tell Asadullah Khan what to do, while having him as the fall guy.'
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Michael had returned to the ‘tents of a prince' after finding that ‘leading the camels of a merchant' was a hazardous exercise. In 1989 he became embroiled in a bugging scandal after a business rival, Robert Holmes a Court, accused Michael's boss, Alan Bond, of tapping his phone. Michael, who was known around Bond Corp as ‘Director – Toys', alerted Australian Federal Police about his involvement in the telephone tapping operation and was placed in protective custody. He later claimed the bugging was ordered by Bond Corp Managing Director Peter Beckwith, because of concerns that damaging information was being leaked from the company.
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The story got murkier when London's
Sunday Times
quoted a Rome-based private detective as saying Bond Corp organised the bugging hoping to link Holmes a Court with an African arms deal allegedly financed by Tiny Rowland, the Chief Executive of trading conglomerate Lonhro.
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Michael resurfaced after bugging charges against him were dropped by Federal prosecutors in October 1990.
The Sydney Morning Herald
reported he was involved in ‘a small outback mining operation in Western Australia'.
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He was in fact trying to resuscitate Jah's Majeed gold mine.

While Michael sweated it out in 50-degree centigrade heat at Halls Creek, Javeri was lodged somewhat more luxuriously in a permanent suite at Hyderabad's Taj Residency Hotel, where he was sorting out Jah's financial situation. Four months earlier the Westpac Bank had taken possession of Havelock House after Jah
had not repaid a loan secured against the property. The disputes over the A$100,000 repair bill for the
Kalbarrie
and the A$400,000 Nazari Bagh land deal were now both before the courts. Banque Indosuez was demanding its US$6 million back.

Javeri claims he lent Jah enough money to clear his most pressing dues. Havelock House was taken off the market and Banque Indosuez lifted the order freezing Jah's assets. He then requested a report from the Perth firm of Freehill Hollingdale & Page reconciling the amounts remitted to and paid through its trust accounts from 1984 onwards. Javeri was concerned that A$23 million he believed had been raised from the sale of assets and other sources during this period were not ‘immediately recognisable in the accounts maintained'. After completing its investigations the firm wrote to Jah on 26 February 1991 that it could only account for A$10,728,174 of what Javeri claimed had been forwarded to Australia.
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Jah's Indian lawyers also went on the offensive, threatening to sue
The Deccan Chronicle
over an article about Jah's new wife, Manolya Onur. The 35-year-old former Miss Turkey had met Jah in late 1989 in Istanbul at a kebab party, unaware that the plainly dressed, balding 56-year-old with a neatly trimmed silver moustache sitting opposite her was a direct descendant of the last Ottoman Caliph. ‘At our first meeting he pointed across the Bosphorus to the Star Palace and said “My granduncle used to live there,”' Manolya recalled. ‘I didn't believe him. I thought he may have been dreaming. But it was a hell of a line, wasn't it?'
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The
Chronicle
article alleged that Jah's new wife had left him ‘in a huff' a few weeks after they were married on 1 August. A ‘fact statement' published by the paper in October said that Manolya had left Hyderabad because of a medical condition and was now back in Australia ‘hale, healthy and happily married to the Nizam'.
¹¹

The statement also set out to correct what Jah's lawyers said
had been a concerted campaign to tarnish the Nizam's image in the press. The thrust of the campaign was that Jah was suffering from AIDS and ‘dying a pauper'. ‘He is daunted by his creditors and haunted by the likes of Interpol . . . He rarely moves out of his “stud farm” in Australia and when he does move out he does it like a thief, stealthily. To overcome his misery, the Nizam is destroying prime national heritage for modern skyscrapers which are to spring up in place of palaces.' The lawyers' statement said the campaign rested on ‘vengeance' and ‘malicious intentions'. Not only was the Nizam in perfect health, he had ‘decided to restore and preserve' the 250-year-old Chowmahalla palace. His alleged ‘cash crisis', the statement went on to say, was being exaggerated ‘to defame him as a pauper'.
¹²

Privately, Jah's legal team was far more pessimistic. As part of his purge of Hyderabadis, Javeri appointed Bhuvenesh Kumari to be Jah's chief legal advisor. A scion of the royal family of Patiala, a 17-gun-salute state in Punjab, Kumari was given the task of trying to ‘piece together a coherent, chronological sequence of events that had led to the present state of affairs'.
¹³
It was a daunting task. ‘Unfortunately there is not a single complete file on any matter that was made available to me,' she wrote in a report to ‘H.E.H. The Nizam of Hyderabad' in April 1991. ‘All the files have been thrown into the erstwhile Tosha Khana [
zenana
quarters] at Nazari Bagh and I am well informed that it will take a minimum of two years of eight hours' work to sort out the files in accordance with the original filing system. There is absolutely no administration at any level. I have established a legal cell.'

Despite the chaos, Kumari attempted to detail an overall picture of Jah's financial and legal affairs for the first time in more than 20 years, since he had inherited his grandfather's estate. It made for depressing reading. Hyderabad's courts, she reported, were clogged with cases concerning income tax, wealth tax and
trust matters. Negotiations with the state government over palace property it wanted to confiscate under the arcane Urban Land Ceiling Act had bogged down. The Jewellery Trust case was ‘before the umpire'. There were 12 cases of litigation in the civil courts concerned with the encroachment of Jah's urban properties. ‘This sort of litigation goes on for generations and . . . should be settled out of court.'

Kumari also advised Jah to resume the chairmanship of all the boards of trustees, which he had been ‘misled into resigning' shortly after being made the Nizam. ‘This has led to a completely chaotic situation in trust affairs.' However, she believed the position was ‘not insurmountable and can be overcome by co-ordinated hard work between H.E.H. and his team of advisors'. She also wrote that the taxation situation was ‘well in hand'. By offsetting moneys loaned the government by the late Nizam, Jah's total indebtedness could be liquidated and still ‘leave him a very substantial amount to reorganise his affairs in accordance with a rational standard of living'.

Jah's worst problems, Kumari found, were in Australia. ‘H.E.H. is caught up in a most unfortunate position of indebtedness in his corporate and personal affairs including a custody fight for his children.' Jah had initially applied for the custody and guardianship of his sons, Azam and Umar, and had contested Helen's will, but had not pursued either case. Helen's two sisters, Rhonda and Julie, she alleged, ‘have a strangulating hold on the boys and their financial interests. H.E.H. is now faced with a prospectively long litigation for guardianship and custody of the children.' Based on oral information, Kumari put Jah's total indebtedness in Australia at approximately A$3 million. Most of his companies there, she advised, should be wound up. In Switzerland, ‘the major portion of H.E.H.'s indebtedness arises from bank loans . . . This matter is being handled entirely by Mr Javeri.'

Kumari concluded her report by stating that Jah's ‘personal,
financial and corporate problems in India and abroad have arisen on account of the total lack of professional persons handling his affairs without any sense of responsibility and accountability. The incredibly fast turnover of professionals and alleged administrators has denied to H.E.H. any control over his affairs.'

As Kumari was preparing her report, David Michael was drawing up a business plan for the Majeed mine. Michael wrote that since its inception the gold mine ‘has proved to be nothing more than a very expensive operation which has returned the Company next to nothing for the investment that has been made. Were it anything but a private concern, funded by private money as a personal interest, it would have been shut down years ago.' Michael identified the problem not as a lack of gold but the failure of ‘management in Perth' to ensure that staff on the site adhered to ‘guidelines, rules and strategies' that would keep them from pilfering much of what was produced. ‘In short, there has never been a plan, and there has never been a meaningful budget to which the mine manager has had to keep, and against which he has had to report. Too often the running of the mine has had to rely on Mr Jah putting his hand into his pocket and this has led to an enormous number of abuses.'
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The position of Murchison House Pastoral Company Pty Ltd, the largest of Jah's concerns in Australia, was also critical. At the end of the 1992 financial year, the company's books showed it had only A$140 cash on hand and A$70,150 in the bank against liabilities of A$9,121,998. The station was running at a huge loss, pulling as little as A$72,000 a year from the sale of feral goats, wool and beef against operating costs averaging over A$200,000.
¹⁵
Like the rest of Jah's business affairs, Murchison House Station had been operating on a ‘quick fix' basis in the knowledge that sooner or later Jah would cough up the money needed to keep it afloat. Now that money had almost run out.

Although he knew it was unlikely ever to be implemented,
Richard Howell, Jah's Perth-based manager and one of the directors of Murchison House Pastoral Company, drew up a management plan for the station. Howell wanted to import Boer goats from South Africa to improve the quality of the wild stock on the station and establish goat-holding facilities to make them easier to muster and transport to Geraldton for export to East Asian markets. He also wanted to rationalise the existing paddocks, which had been added to in an ad hoc fashion by Jah, and explore tourism-related opportunities. He estimated it would cost A$570,000 over two years to make the station viable.
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