Developer cheats 60 Dahisar families of ₹36 crore

Sixty members of the housing society were promised homes in the redeveloped ground-plus-13-storey tower

The Economic Offence Wing (EOW) of the Mumbai Police has registered a case against three partners of a construction firm for allegedly duping 60 families in Dahisar to the tune of ₹36 crore in the name of redeveloping their property.

Dahisar Ujjwal Co-operative Housing Society, in Kandarpada is still under construction (HT Photo)

Sandeep Seth, Dharmesh Tanna and Amit Patil of the KT Group have been booked under the Maharashtra Ownership Flats Act (Mofa), but no arrest has been made in the case so far. Seth however, was recently arrested by the Malad police in relation to a similar case.

According to EOW sources, 73-year-old complainant Mahadev Panchal, a Dahisar resident, stated that the Borivli based developers had taken up the redevelopment work of their building Dahisar Ujjwal Co-operative Housing Society, in Kandarpada, in 2007.

“Sixty members of the housing society were promised homes in the redeveloped ground-plus-13-storey tower, while another building would be constructed on the same plot of which the apartments would be sellable. The redevelopment agreement was prepared and was registered as per the procedure. But the construction work of the project was stopped in October 2015,” Panchal said. The redeveloped building was supposed to be ready in three years, but till date it is still under construction.

When the residents raised the issue, the developers agreed to keep four to six flats in their Mehek Plaza building in Borivli (West) together worth ₹12crore, mortgaged with them for security. However, the three accused later sold those flats along with 39 flats from the Dhahisar sellable area worth ₹24 crore, thus cheating the original tenants of a total of ₹36 crore, Panchal alleged in the first information report (FIR).

Sunil Khanolkar, one of the members of the society, said, “We have given our 1 TDR (transfer of development rights) and 1 FSI to the developer to carry out construction on a 5,302 square-metre area, but he flouted the law and developed a total of 7,155 square-metre area and illegally sold the flats. We got to know this after we obtained details from a search report and submitted the same to the EOW.

“The 60 affected families are mostly of retired people, who get a monthly pension of around ₹10,000 to ₹15,000. One can imagine how we are managing to pay our monthly rent and manage other expanses in a city like Mumbai,” Khanolkar said.

“The developers stopped giving us rent from July 1, 2016. We were the actual owners of the property. The developer developed houses on our property, made wrongful gains and left us homeless. We are forced to live on rent and are paying for it from our own pocket,” Panchal said.

The housing unit of EOW has booked the three builders under sections 409, 420 and 34 of IPC and 3, 4 and 13 of Mofa, and is in the process of collecting evidence. HT attempted to call and sms the developers to get their comment but they were unreachable.