Court allows auction of Nirav Modi’s art collection

Shiv Kumar
Tribune News Service
Mumbai, March 20

A special court set up under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) on Wednesday allowed the auction of absconding diamond merchant Nirav Modi’s art collection.

Special Judge Salman Azmi of the PMLA court allowed the Income Tax department to proceed with the auction of 68 modern Indian art paintings seized from various premises belonging to Modi and his shell companies. The book value of the 68 paintings is Rs 57.72 crore. The entire art collection of Modi includes more than 125 paintings, according to the Punjab National Bank which has allegedly been defrauded of Rs 7,000 crore by the diamond merchant.
According to officials here, the auction will happen through an online auction house later this month.

The collection includes Raja Ravi Varma’s ‘The Maharajah of Travancore and his younger brother welcoming Richard Grenville in 1880’, which has a book value of Rs 4 crore. Other items in his collection reportedly include works by MF Husain, Hebbar and modern artistes like Om Soorya’s ‘Narcissus was he seeing his own images in the lake’, Surendran Nair lithograph ‘About growing wings’, Amit Ambalal’s ‘Fruits of Fear’, J Sultan Ali’s ‘Parmannu series’, including titles such as ‘Shatruta’ and ‘Adharma’, and Jayashree Chakravarty’s ‘Fortune Teller’.