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It’s a hot summer afternoon. Janet, dressed in a loose black ensemble, sinks deep into her sofa in the living room of her tastefully renovated mansion off a shaded bylane in a north Goa village — and sighs.
“We put our lifeblood into this country and now we’re treated as criminals. I wish we had not put our money here,” she says.
It’s been over a decade since Janet and her family left their home in Europe for Goa, like hundreds of other foreigners — many of them retirees — wooed by the tropical lush and warm weather and a grand lifestyle on a pension enough to get by back home.
But over the last year or so, foreigners have been sitting on a soon-to-erupt volcano that threatens to melt their dream.
Janet is one of 450 foreigners whose properties in Goa have come under the relentless scanner of the enforcement directorate (ED). Like most of them, her husband, Felipe, does the rounds of the ED in the state’s capital, Panaji, to meet the agency’s assistant director, Girish Lotlikar, who has become a household name among Goa’s foreigners.
“These properties, 120 of them owned by Britishers, are in north Goa and were purchased between 2000 and 2007,” says the soft-spoken Lotlikar, who sits in a ruin of an office at Shramshakti Bhavan.
The government believes there are many reasons these property transactions can be counted as illegal. “Some have violated coastal regulation rules and have sea water entering them at high tide,” Lotlikar says. He adds that 60 per cent of these owners have violated a basic rule of the Foreign Exchange Management Act (Fema), 1999. To buy a property, they have to spend 182 days in the preceding financial year in the country, but many haven’t done so, he points out.
The same clause — Section 2(v) of the act — disqualifies foreigners who go abroad for employment, business, vocation or any other purpose that would indicate an intention to stay outside India for an uncertain period from buying property.
But how does a foreigner prove that he or she intends to stay on in India? For them, Lotlikar places a tall and unpalatable order. “Foreigners will have to sell their immovable property back home and invest the proceeds in India through legitimate banking channels,” he says.
“Ridiculous,” retorts Janet, who says her property was registered, but she was anyway served with a notice. Scared that her visa extension will not come through, she contemplates leaving for a place such as Cambodia — a newer expat destination. But like countless others trapped by the rules, she cannot sell a property whose ownership is mired in legal issues.
The state government is aware of the Catch-22 situation that the foreigners find themselves in, and appears to be offering a solution to the matter. A seven-member committee has been set up to address applications from expats eager to sell and move on.
“We’ve received 25 applications and will put them before the government if the ED declares their titles are clear,” says the committee’s head and Goa’s state registrar and head of notary services, P.S.S. Bodke. The committee includes officers from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and the law and revenue departments.
As per RBI rules, a foreigner can sell property in India to a person residing in India, a non-resident Indian or a person of Indian origin (PIO) with the prior approval of the RBI.
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| PIC: REENA MARTINS |
Fema allows an officer of the rank of assistant or deputy-director of the ED to confiscate property but also leaves room for appeals to the special director (appeals) and the appellate tribunal for foreign exchange. The last resort would be the courts, says Lotlikar.
According to reports, 12 properties have been confiscated so far. Signboards are put up near them, but the owners still occupy these properties as the ED is not the last word on ownership rights.
Four of these confiscated properties are in Morjim or Little Russia. Just off the beach, there stands a 19,906-square-metre stretch, planted with an ED confiscation order dating back to 2006. The land is said to have been bought by a Russian company.
“As a mark of protest, I ploughed this agricultural land and got threats from the Russians,” says Rajan Ghate, former general secretary of the Nationalist Congress Party, who has been instrumental in getting Goa’s foreign property owners in hot water.
In a quiet settlement further inland, Morjim’s sarpanch and former policeman, Dhananjay Shedgaonkar, takes credit for uprooting signboards in Russian that were seen at every other turn in the village which meanders along the northern bank of the Chapora river.
Shedgaonkar’s actions appear to be synchronised with the attitude of Goa’s political class towards foreigners buying property in the state. Last month its legislative Assembly passed a unanimous resolution seeking special status for Goa, in an attempt to regulate ownership and transfer of land, along lines similar to those in Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Mizoram.
But to dodge the law, foreigners have been buying benami properties from builders or locals, says a local builder in south Goa. “After a few years they exchange them for others in different parts of Goa.”
Many of the foreigners are also victims. Some have unknowingly bought agricultural land. Others have been hoodwinked by builders. Sanjay Shirodkar, a Goa-based property lawyer, says he is dealing with four cases of foreigners whose properties hang in the balance as the builders from whom they purchased them refused to have them registered.
Not surprisingly, some foreigners are now thinking of leaving Goa. Goa Life, a closed Facebook group of foreigners in the state, has had at least five members selling property over the last five months. They’re moving out of Goa. Some are headed to Cambodia.
On the discussion forum of britishexpats.com there is no dearth of such stories.
“The closure of the registrar has given opportunity aplenty to many of the thieving b@#$%^&* who have got rich by cheating foreigners,” says a poster who goes as “dreadsoc”. He writes of a British couple who, unable to register the sale deed of their house in north Goa because of a change of rules, lost £1,50,000-1,75,000.
He then adds: “I have known of other cases where foreigners have registered property in the name of an Indian they trust and that ‘trusted’ person has claimed the premises as his own. Builders are buying back properties they sold to foreigners but only refunding the original purchase price.”
A poster on a British expat site, however, has a word of advice for fellow expats: “…remember this is India and the rules will invariably change depending on the day of the week, the position of the moon and person you are talking to.”
(Some names have been changed to protect identities.)