Complaint registered against Adani Realty

MUMBAI: Leading consumer rights protection body Mumbai Grahak Panchayat (MGP) has lodged a complaint with housing regulator MahaRERA against Adani Realty for allegedly advertising and marketing a luxury housing project on Andheri RTO land without obtaining the mandatory MahaRERA registration.

MGP chairperson Adv Shirish Deshpande said the leaflets of the yet unnamed project were being circulated through newspapers with Adani Realty logo, with a MahaRERA registration number at the bottom of the advertisement in fine print. “When I cross-checked this registration number on the MahaRERA website, I was shocked to see that it belonged to an old project of Adani group at Four Bungalows, Andheri (west). This project is already complete and even the said registration has expired,” Deshpande said. The registration number in the ad – P51800001290 – belonged to Western Heights Phase 1 project in DN Nagar, a 30-storey high-rise which had a completion date of June 30, 2019.

MGP activist Dr Archana Sabnis then contacted people through the numbers displayed in the advertisement and learnt that the developer was in the process of registering the project with MahaRERA. Meanwhile,

more than 4,000 consumers had made bookings in this unregistered project, she found out. Given this background, MGP has now approached MahaRERA chairman, Ajoy Mehta, raising strong objections and sought legal action against Adani Realty for violating Section 3 of RERA.

Section 3 of Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act (RERA), 2016, states: “No promoter shall advertise, market, book, sell or offer for sale, or invite persons to purchase in any manner any plot, apartment or building, as the case may be, in any real estate project or part of it, in any planning area, without registering the real estate project with the Real Estate Regulatory Authority established under this Act.”

The violation of Section 3 has stringent penalties. Section 59 of RERA empowers MahaRERA to impose a penalty which can be extended up to 10 per cent of the total project cost for such a breach. Section 60 provides for penalties that can be extended up to 5 per cent of the total project cost for giving false information. A spokesperson for Adani Realty said, “The company has not issued any such ads. Our project is in the process of registration. It appears that one of our brokers or channel partners may have done this. We have clear guidelines, and a code of conduct for our channel partners.”