AFTER 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.’1 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.2 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.’3 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.’5
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.6 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.7 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’.8 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.9
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?’10 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.’14
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.16
Howell was right about the plan not seeing the light of day, but even he did not expect events to take a turn for the worse so quickly. On 23 May 1992, Murchison House Pastoral Company was wound up over a relatively minor debt of A$54,000 to a Perth-based businessman. Jah’s lawyers had tried unsuccessfully to get an adjournment based on two affidavits filed by Howell that referred to the sale of a palace in India and the forwarding of A$130,000 to the company. In July, Havelock House was also back on the market after Jah failed to make a repayment. According to an affidavit later filed by Howell, a rescue plan was formulated where Javeri’s Australian companies, Kingsburg Pty Ltd and Shanaz Pty Ltd, borrowed money in Geneva against Jah’s jewellery. Kingsburg then lent Murchison House Pastoral A$2.3 million against its assets at an interest rate of 12 per cent, which saved it from liquidation.17 At the time Javeri and Howell were joint directors of both companies.
Jah seemed strangely nonplussed about his brush with insolvency. In April 1993, after avoiding the media for almost three years, Jah invited Bill Thompson from Perth’s Sunday Times to Havelock House. With slight variations on what he told earlier interviewers, he recounted his early life, his first impressions of Perth and his feelings about the death of Helen from AIDS. Asked to comment on rumours of his insolvency he admitted that ‘during the past several years the advice I have taken has not always been sound. Certainly my mind was on many other things and I relied perhaps too much on advice from others.’ But Jah refused to play the role of a pauper prince, listing assets that ‘would turn the head of a Texas millionaire’. ‘The family jewellery trust is worth about [A]$150 million at last estimate and half of that is mine. The properties I haven’t a clue about – but it is much more than that.’ Jah added to the list his stable of vintage Rolls-Royces and Bentleys, the two giant coins which were now in the possession of the Banque Indosuez, and hinted that he might auction off more of the family jewellery in Hyderabad, before concluding with the comment: ‘My 20 years here have been the happiest of my life. I have found my Kismet.’18
Jah’s optimism was premature. It would be another two years before the jewellery trust sale was finalised, with the government only paying half of the A$150 million Jah hoped for. Another legal battle would prevent him from getting his share for seven years after that. Nor did he use any assets at his disposal to prevent Havelock House being put on the market for a third time in December 1993. The Kalbarrie had been sold for scrap value. And to rub salt into old wounds, Perth’s tabloid press was spruiking the ‘prince and his harem’ story for all it was worth.
On 19 December 1993 a banner headline reading ‘PREGNANT PRINCESS IN HIDING’ was splashed across the front page of the Sunday Times.19 The story concerned 22-year-old Moroccan-born Jamila Boularas, whom Jah had wed in August 1993 in a Muslim ceremony while still married to Manolya. According to Jamila, she met Jah at a dinner party in India and the two were married the next day. The daughter of a Moroccan army officer, Jamila was said to have grown up feeding ‘Atlas gazelles in the Tadlaoui gardens by the side of blue and pink marble fountains of natural springs . . . [and] reading the holy Koran and courtly poetry going back to the 12th century in Arabic and French.’20
The romance over, Jamila was reported to be in hiding after the breakdown of the marriage and claimed that she or her baby could be killed if they returned to Morocco, where ‘strict cultural codes forbid a woman to have a child without the support of a father’.21 DNA tests would later prove that the baby girl, Zairin, born on 6 July 1994, was not Jah’s. But yet again his name had been dragged through the mud by the press. The following month, he and Manolya began divorce proceedings.
The sale of Havelock House in June 1994 was in many ways a turning point. Jah would later say that the Perth mansion he once shared with Helen held too many painful memories for him and he was glad to see it go. But the sale was the first nail in the coffin of his Australian empire and would lead to his damaging rift with Javeri.
Jah had hoped the eight-bedroom, six-bathroom property with enough garage space for half a dozen cars would fetch more than A$3 million and that he would be able to plough the money back into Murchison House Station. But the medical consortium wanting to turn it into an upmarket psychiatric hospital was only offering $2.1 million. On 4 June 1994 Javeri sent Howell a fax from Geneva authorising him to accept the offer and for the proceeds from the sale to go towards clearing outstanding wages, leave entitlements and Jah’s loans.22 Howell and Helen Tilden, who had worked as Jah’s secretary since 1989 and was also a director of Murchison House Pastoral Company, had not been remunerated for almost a year. Michael was owed more than six months’ salary. Tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of bills from creditors in Perth, Kalbarri and Halls Creek were waiting to be paid. When Howell faxed Javeri on 27 October after the settlement had been completed with a detailed list of cheques issued to pay wages, rates, taxes and bills and other outstanding debts, there was just $300,000 left over.23
When the fax reached Javeri, who was staying at Istanbul’s Conrad Hotel, he was shocked. He had expected the bulk of the proceeds of the sale to go to his company Shanaz. His anger turned to fury when he found out that Jah had pocketed the remainder.24 Javeri later alleged that Jah had promised to make the remaining funds available to him to pay off some of the A$3.5 million he had lent him over the years. Phoning his boss from his suite, Javeri announced that he was quitting. During the series of long and tense telephone calls that followed, Jah pleaded with him to stay on. Javeri eventually agreed, but tersely told Jah he had six months to find a replacement.
Javeri’s appointment as principal advisor and chairman of the Nizam’s Private Estate in 1990 had always been controversial. Javeri was an outsider, spending most of his time travelling between the outposts of his jewellery empire in Dallas, London, New York and Geneva. He had good connections among jewellery and antique dealers and had helped Jah offload millions of dollars’ worth of assets in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Jah avoids discussing their relationship, but Javeri was not so reticent. Shortly before he died he told The Deccan Chronicle how he and Jah were once very close. ‘I’d speak to him for four hours every day. I still have a lot of affection for him, but I have neither admiration nor respect for him any more. The sad thing is that he is one of the most intelligent men in this country and there was so much he could have done. But it wasn’t to be.’25
Most of the stories being swapped in the lobbies of Hyderabad’s five-star hotels in the early 1990s concerned Javeri’s property dealings and his alleged involvement in the theft of antiques from Jah’s palaces. The Chronicle’s Ayoob Ali Khan recalls the rumour mill:
Supposing Sadruddin was selling ‘x’ property. How much of the money was going back according to the Prince? Supposing he had sold ten articles. Were all these ten articles accounted for? Was there any inventory when he took over? Was there any inventory when he left? Sadruddin walks into a void and gets in a situation where there are fair chances of him being accused of malpractices. True or not, that’s debatable.26
Javeri’s wife, Scheherazade, admits her husband had no choice but to bend the rules to satisfy his boss’s need for cash. Unable to evict land-grabbers, he brokered deals that allowed them to keep the properties they had illegally acquired by paying the Nizam’s Estate a percentage of the market value. Scheherazade claims that her late husband raised A$15 million this way and sent all the proceeds to Jah’s companies on top of the millions he loaned him personally.27
As in other large Indian cities, Hyderabad’s property laws are virtually unenforceable, its Municipal Corporation is riddled with corruption and local politicians are easily bought off. Vacant land is considered fair game. Any piece of garbagestrewn dirt that does not already have a building on it or is not a construction site has a sign painted in large red letters on a boulder or hastily erected wall saying: ‘This land belongs to . . .’ followed by a mobile telephone number. Within a few years it will become another shopping mall, office suite or residential apartment block without any reference to building codes or urban-planning guidelines. When Hyderabad was beginning its building boom in the 1980s, by far the largest swathes of vacant prime real estate were under the control of the Nizam’s Private Estate. By the time Javeri had left the scene only a few dozen of the 2200 properties that Osman Ali Khan had bequeathed to his grandson would still be in Jah’s possession, and that number was about to drop even further.
In January 1995, three MLAs belonging to the right-wing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party threatened ‘to hoist the Indian tricolour’ from the flagpoles of the Nizam’s palaces if the state government did not consider a cabinet subcommittee report recommending their takeover. The committee had found that ‘there had been a lapse on the part of the higher officials as they had failed to take timely action to safeguard the [Nizam’s] properties from encroachments’. The BJP politicians also alleged that Jah had collected US$25 million as an advance from foreigners to covert Falaknuma into a five-star hotel.28
Though on shaky ground financially and now under attack politically, Jah still commanded some clout. On 17 February he hosted an Iftar party at Chowmahalla palace to celebrate the end of fasting during the holy month of Ramadan. The candlelit dinner, attended by Krishan Kant, the state’s governor, Sultan Salahuddin Owaisi, the president of the main Muslim party, the Majlis Ittehad-ul-Musulimeen, as well as other local luminaries, was arranged in front of the Khilawat where Jah had been crowned as Nizam 21 years earlier. The party not only gave Jah the chance do some lobbying, it was an opportunity to introduce guests to his new wife, 37-year-old Turkish national Ayesha Arkide. The two had married the previous day. It was the fifth time for Jah, the third time for Ayesha.
A few weeks later Jah had discarded his fez, sherwani and patent leather shoes and was back in his old workman’s trousers and braces at Murchison House Station doing what he loved most: tending his graders, dozers and four-wheel drives. In April he gave what would be his last media interview to Mara Beare of Perth’s Sunday Times. Jah spoke of how he had been dropped into a ‘void’ when he was made the Eighth Nizam of a state that had ceased to exist. ‘So what do I do? I go back to doing this.’ Beare described him as looking as though ‘he could be anyone’s granddad – gentle, grey-haired, even a little eccentric’. The rambling outback homestead was the reverse of what one might expect an Indian prince to own, observed Mara, ‘right down to the old pictures on the wall that look like they came from the local jumble sale’. ‘Prince Jah said he had nothing to hide,’ added Beare. ‘The past three years had been rocky but now he hoped a turnaround would occur.’29
Once again the isolation of the Australian outback afforded Jah a mental escape from his mounting financial and legal problems, but this time there would be no turnaround. As Jah showed his new wife around the station, another round of litigation, relating to the sale in January of the Nizam’s jewels, was being launched in India. Jah’s eldest children, Azmat and Shekhyar, were challenging their father’s right to his share of the sale on the grounds that he was incompetent to handle money. The other beneficiaries, all of them related to Jah, had been forced to put their spending plans on hold after finding out that they were only entitled to the interest on the corpus during their lifetime. After the tax authorities claimed their share, there was little of the 2.18 billion rupees left over apart from Jah’s 537-million-rupee entitlement as ‘the head of the family’. It was this share that now became the focus of litigation. Jah’s counterattack was to challenge the government’s compulsory acquisition of the jewellery, which if sold on the open market could have received at least three times the price.
Javeri was also angry, calling the final amount paid by the government a ‘pittance, an insult’. But he blamed Jah for the mess. ‘His [the Nizam’s] biggest mistake was that instead of staying here and fighting he turned his back on his problems and left the country,’ Javeri told London’s Sunday Times on 16 April 1995. ‘It is very difficult for anyone from that dynasty to adapt to modern times. Until 20 years ago money had no meaning for the Nizams of Hyderabad. If they paid £1 or £1 million, it meant the same to them. Money was just something to spend.’30
It was the last time Jah allowed Javeri to speak on his behalf. On 25 May 1995 a public notice was published in several Hyderabad newspapers announcing the termination of Javeri’s services and citing alleged irregularities committed by him as chairman of the Nizam’s Private Estate. Javeri would later claim that he was sacked two days after a heated argument with Jah’s England-based legal advisor, Anwarullah Pasha, over plans to hand over control of his palaces to the Taj Group, India’s largest hotel chain. The Taj had already converted several properties belonging to former rulers into five-star hotels, including the Lake Palace in Udaipur, made famous in the James Bond movie Octopussy. It had long coveted the 220-room Falaknuma, the most opulent and best preserved of Jah’s remaining properties. Jah was hoping that leasing it to the Taj would give him some financial breathing space.
Jah’s spin-doctors put out a different story. Shortly after the sacking, Calcutta’s The Telegraph quoted ‘palace sources’ as saying Javeri and his wife ‘were allegedly involved in embezzlement and did not list all antiques and jewellery listed in palace inventories’. The article alleged that antiques had disappeared from palaces only to surface at Javeri’s shop in Geneva. Javeri denied any wrongdoing, claiming that the sale had been authorised by Jah to meet his expenses. The Telegraph traced the royal rift back to an earlier stoush between Jah and the Javeris over their refusal to accept a deal by the Hyatt Hotel group for converting the palaces into five-star hotels. His dismissal, the paper said, had ‘come as a relief to royalists’.31
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.32
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 1995.33
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.”’34
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’.35 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.36
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.37
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.’38
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’.39
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’.40
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.’41
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.42
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’.43
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.44
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’.45 Colliers Jardine said it had been ‘inundated with calls from prospective buyers’.46
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.47
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.’48
But this time there would be no eleventh-hour rescue package, no hurriedly arranged sales of jewellery in Geneva and no benefactors to bail him out. Nor would Jah turn up at the auction. He had not been seen at Murchison House Station or in Australia since March 1996. ‘I said goodbye to him on a Friday morning as he was going off to the mosque, which he did religiously,’ recalls Tilden, who was working in Jah’s Perth office at the time. ‘He said: “I’ll see you on Monday.” I have never seen him since. That was it.’49
Months later, Tilden finally found out why Jah had not told her or anyone else apart from David Michael that he was leaving. With no cash in his Australian company’s accounts and creditors knocking at his office door, Jah had been led to believe, falsely, that Tilden would have an absconding debtors warrant taken out against him. ‘He had never left the country without me knowing before. When I found out on the Monday I was floored. I knew straight away it was over.’50
Michael’s explanation was that Jah was the innocent victim of ‘an elaborate hoax’ that Javeri carefully devised and skilfully deployed. Looking back at the events leading up to Jah’s departure from Australia he says: ‘The fall of the House of Asaf Jah was part political, part social, part conspiratorial and part total ineptitude.’51
Jah, however, saw things in terms of fate or Kismet, and if fate had willed that Helen should die of AIDS and that his finances would collapse, then it was time to leave. For almost a quarter of a century he had tried to carve out a kingdom in the desert, nurturing dreams of retiring quietly and gracefully as ‘an old-fashioned gentleman farmer, who through choice of his own adopted the Australian way of life’.52 Now those dreams were shattered and his Dominions were turning to dust. For the third time in his life the last Nizam of Hyderabad was going into exile, but this time he was escaping from his past.