Last Nizam (9781742626109)

by Zubrzycki, John

  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 als
o 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