Hyderabad: In order to recover the pending rent from a businessman who was evading the payment for 14 months after taking the godown on the lease, the godown owner sold 1.29 lakh books for Rs 15 lakh, at Rs 10 a kg in the market. The Jawaharnagar police arrested three persons and recovered all the books worth Rs 3.24 crore on Tuesday.
Niketan Devadiga, a businessman from Bengaluru and resident of Gandhinagar, had taken a godown belonging to P Narsimha Reddy located at Jawaharnagar for Rs 50,000 rent. Niketan is into the business of selling various books on general studies to the state governments, which would be put in the government schools and libraries. He recently had a successful deal with the Andhra Pradesh state government and was waiting for the proceedings to finish at Telangana and Jharkhand.
He bought books from a publication house in Delhi and brought them to the city, and stored them at Narsimha Reddy’s godown. As the state government did not finalise the deal, Niketan could not find another source of money and defaulted the payment to Reddy, for the past 14 months.
As Niketan was delaying the payment, Reddy along with his son Srinivas went to their godown and stole the books. They loaded about 1.29 lakh books into 10 lorries and sold them to one Md Raziuddin, who runs MR Book Centre at Begumpet, who in turn sold the books to a businessman Dhamjee, who runs Adinath Books Sales at Bhiwandi in Mumbai.
Rachakonda police commissioner Mahesh Bhagwat said, “Narsimha, who was angry with Niketan for not paying the rent, broke open the lock and stole the books. He sold the books for Rs 15 lakh to Raziuddin, who sold the same to Dhamjee for Rs 22 lakh, knowing the books were stolen. Acting swiftly on the complaint, a team rushed to Mumbai and recovered the books.”
