Mumbai: Hitting back at Bharatiya Janata Party’s Leader of Opposition Devendra Fadnavis, Nationalist Congress Party Minister Nawab Malik refuted allegations of ‘mafia links’ and accused the BJP leader of attempting to “make a mountain out of a molehill’, here on Tuesday.
Malik dismissed Fadnavis’ sensational allegations that a Malik-linked company Solidus Investments Pvt. Ltd. (SIPL) had entered into a prime land deal in Goawala Compound, Kurla, at throwaway prices with two alleged associates of the absconder mafia don, Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar.
They are: M. Salim Ishaq Patel and Sardar Shahvali Khan, who Fadnavis — a former Maharashtra Chief Minister — claimed are both close aides of Dawood and the latter (Khan) is a convict sentenced to life imprisonment in the March 1993 Mumbai serial bomb blasts.
“The deal in question was getting ownership rights as we were the tenants of a landlady (the Goawala Compound owner) who had vested her Power of Attorney (PoA) to M. Salim Ishaq Patel. A building, ‘Madinatul Aman CHS’, with over 125 tenants has stood there since 1984 and on the adjoining plot there are slums. So how is Fadnavis saying we created fake tenants to grab the plot at throwaway rates,” Malik asked.
Malik said when they went to register their ownership rights, they discovered that the father of Sardar Shahvali Khan had grabbed 300 metres of the plot with his name figuring in the land records, and the tenants paid him off to clear his illegal claims.
“It’s a well-known fact that Sardar Shahvali Khan was a convict in the March 1993 Mumbai serial bomb blasts, but we had no deal with him… As for M. Ishaq Patel’s alleged links with Dawood or his sister, as for us he was the authorised PoA holder of the landlady,” Malik declared.
“We did not transact any land business deal with the mafia, as falsely alleged by Fadnavis, all transactions, financials and documents are on record in public domain… In fact, if Fadnavis had asked me, I would have provided him with more details which his aides have failed to,” Malik smiled.
Announcing a counter-attack, Malik said though Fadnavis failed to make any ‘post-Diwali blast’, he warned that on Wednesday, he (Malik) would drop a Hydrogen-bomb on Fadnavis’ mafia connections and how he held Mumbai at ransom when he was the CM (2014-2019) with the help of an underworld don.