Hotel owner drags DMRC to high court

Adil Singh Akoi, one of the heirs to the plush Hotel Imperial in the capital, has moved the Delhi High Court against the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation for quashing a tender taken out by the latter for a five-star hotel on a site that was once co-owned by the former.

The dispute is over a 10,800-square-metre property at New Delhi's 8, Jantar Mantar Road that was first acquired by the Union of India through the Ministry of Urban Development in 2000 and handed over to the DMRC the same year.

Akoi, 50 per cent owner of the land, is alleging that 8,386.6 square metres of this land is lying vacant for which the DMRC is inviting bids for developing and operating a five-star hotel for 30 years. Besides quashing of the tender, the petitioner is also asking the court to direct the DMRC to return the unused land to the original owners.

The other five owners of the land are Akoi's cousins and have no stake in Hotel Imperial.

The DMRC required the land as the Metro alignment would pass underneath the property in question. "This has come as a great shock and surprise to the petitioner as both the respondents (Union of India and DMRC) have, by fraud and misrepresentation, acquired the property under a guise of public purpose and the said respondents are now exploiting the high potential of the land by using it commercially to personally profit from the same," states the petition filed by Akoi last month.

"We have a scheme for property development which is necessary for funding the Metro expansion. This hotel development falls in line with that scheme. The high court has not directed any stay. We have been given time to file a counter affidavit," said the DMRC spokesperson. The next hearing is in July.

The petitioner further alleges that he, along with the other co-owners, had approached the DMRC to jointly develop the land, but the latter had rejected all these proposals.

"It is pertinent to mention that the father of the petitioner co-owns one of the best five-star hotels in the country and is also a very successful industrialist, therefore the petitioner had all the resources to jointly develop the land along with DMRC," states the petition.

In 2000, Akoi had claimed a total compensation of Rs 400 crore (which includes the land value, the entitled solatium at the rate of 30 per cent and statutory interest provided in the Land Acquisition Act, 1894).

However, the land acquisition collector gave only Rs 27.86 crore as compensation in 2002 (at a fixed the rate of Rs 18,480 a square metre). This dispute is currently in a lower court.