A special MPID court in Mumbai has cleared the way for Mukesh Sharma, once a director at Kuber Mutual Benefits Ltd, to buy four properties that the Economic Offences Wing froze back in 2000. The order, passed Saturday, ends a 26-year limbo for land the state itself had struggled to sell off.

The properties are valued at Rs 58 crore. Court papers name three of them specifically, a plot in Vashi's Sector 10, one in CBD Belapur's Sector 15, and another in Sector 4. Money from the sale goes straight to the competent authority handling the case, which is meant to use it to pay back investors who lost money to the scheme.

Sharma, 72, was one of eleven accused, alongside companies and Praduman Kumar Sharma, who chaired Kuber Mutual Benefits Ltd. The EOW had alleged the outfit cheated roughly 2,000 investors. Praduman Kumar Sharma died while the trial was still on. Mukesh Sharma was acquitted in 2023, but the attachment on these properties stayed put, apparently outliving both the case and the man who ran the company at its centre.

Why it took this long

According to the plea Sharma filed, the authorities had tried and failed for years to find buyers for the land at auction. Nobody wanted attached property sitting in legal limbo, which meant it just sat there, generating nothing for the investors it was supposed to eventually compensate.

CIDCO, the Navi Mumbai development body, opposed Sharma getting the plots back even though his offer was, by the plea's own account, a good one. Its argument was that he shouldn't get the relief regardless of price, and separately that he owes lease rent running from the date of attachment all the way to 2019, a bill CIDCO put at Rs 150 crore.

The court didn't let CIDCO block the sale outright, but it didn't wave away the lease-rent question either. Sharma, as the buyer, will have to settle whatever dues CIDCO determines under its own lease terms, rules and policies before this actually closes.

In its order, the bench framed the bigger picture like this: "The properties have So continued to remain attached without the process resulting in realisation of their value for the ultimate benefit of the depositors. The fact that an asset remains under attachment is undoubtedly relevant for protecting the asset, but attachment cannot, by itself, be treated as the final object of the statute."

In plain terms, freezing the land forever helped nobody, least of all the 2,000 people the whole case was supposed to protect.

What happens now depends on how fast CIDCO's dues get worked out and whether Sharma actually goes through with the purchase at the price he offered. Only once that money changes hands does it head toward the investors who have been waiting since the year 2000 to see any of it.