Last Nizam (9781742626109) (38 page)

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