Unreal estates

The income tax raid on the premises of real estate developers MGF-Emaar would have been considered routine had it not been for the fact that the joint venture company was not coming out with a public issue. Emaar, one of the biggest real estate companies in Dubai, along with the Indian company, had created a land bank worth Rs 50,000 crore and are hoping to offload 10 per cent shares to raise Rs 5-6,000 crore. The income tax raids were conducted in 30 premises of the group and many of their bank lockers and accounts were seized. Although the company gave this information to the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), there is a lot more that seems to have eluded the media and probable investors. Government sources claim that there is a Cyprus angle to this company that has not been adequately explained. It has been claimed that there is an office in Nicosia, Cyprus, representing MGF-Emaar, but the address only leads to a lawyer's office. The government attempts to figure out definitively the Cyprus connection has drawn a blank.

What is really intriguing to many MGF-Emaar watchers is that there has been no follow up on these raids in any of the established media entities. MGF-Emaar, it may be recalled, are big advertisers and were the sponsors of the recent T-20 World Cup. They have also bagged the contract to build a Commonwealth Games village in Delhi and are putting together high value properties. The recent fire in the income tax office in Delhi, where important files and documents were stacked, has lent a sinister twist to this tale. There is another body of opinion among sympathisers of this real estate group which claims that the raids were engineered by a formidable business house that wanted the real estate builder's IPO to collapse.