MUMBAI: The Bombay High Court has ordered the auction of five paintings owned by Mafatlal Dyes and Chemicals Limited (MDCL), which went under liquidation in 2010. It held that the paintings, including works by MF Husain and FN Souza, belonged to the company and not members of the Mafatlal family including Atulya Mafatlal and his former wife Sheetal, who staked their claim to the art works.
The paintings were placed under the care of the Sir JJ School of Art by the company court. five paintings were identified by the police as belonging to MDCL While family members squabbled over their ownership. Another sibling, Gayatri Jhaveri, who made her claims through Ajay and her parents, was also in the fray. Sheetal, on the other hand, filed a complaint of dowry harassment, matrimonial cruelty and domestic violence against Marushka, Atulya and other members of the Mafatlal family. The police later found ten paintings in the house of Sheetal’s friend Yasmin Valibhoy, who she later fell out with.
Unable to pay its debts, MDCL went into liquidation in 2010. To recover the company’s dues, the official liquidator filed three reports relating to the 44 paintings seized by the Mumbai Police in January 2014 following allegations of theft and other criminal offences made against each other by members of the Mafatlal family. The paintings had been at the centre of a family dispute since August 2011, when Atulya’s daughter Marushka filed a police complaint against her stepmother Sheetal accusing her of stealing 35 paintings and moving them out of the Mafatlal bungalow.
A single-judge bench of Justice Somasekhar Sundaresan said, “In the teeth of the asset register, the purchase vouchers and the affidavits of the Mumbai Police, which make a clearly reasonable case for the (five) identified paintings to belong to the company, Sheetal and Atulya have chosen not to lead evidence and their conduct calls for adverse inference.
The question before the court was whether the five paintings identified by the police belonged to MDCL and could be used to recover dues to its creditors, or whether they belonged to one of the feuding family members. Yasmin had also questioned Sheetal’s claim to ownership of the paintings before the court. On Wednesday, the high court noted that the company’s promoters were engaged in a three-way fight among Atulya, son of the late Yogindra Mafatlal, his brother Ajay, and Sheetal.
Sheetal relied on these consent terms to claim that she was allowed to retain possession of the paintings. She claimed that Atulya, Ajay and Marushka had consented not to claim them. The family was referred to a mediator by the high court and they filed consent terms and arrived at a settlement in 2012.
