BOMBAY — Four people, one of them a Belgian antique dealer held by the enforcement directorate here in connection with smuggling of four vintage cars of the erstwhile Nabha princely family of Punjab to En- gland were Monday remanded to judicial custody till July 19 by Bombay’s chief metropolitan magistrate.

The four are — Dirk Ar- thur Borgers a 48-year-old Belgian, Shakir Shauka- tali, a director of a Gujarat- based firm and to partners of a trading agency here.

Enforcement directorate officials told the court that they had recovered some documents from a house of Shaukatali in Ahmedabad, capital of Jugarat state.

Preliminary scrutiny of the documents revealed copies of a line of credit for 3,500,000 British pounds opened in favor of the Belgian, besides some foreign bank account numbers,

The cars included a 1912 Brook Swan and a Rolls Royce of the same vintage year. They had been shipped from Alaj, a Report in Gujarat, to the London and Oriental commodities LTD.

They were passed off as “Indian handcrafted assembled units” and under-in- voiced. Two of the cars were recently auctioned in London — for British pounds, In violation of a ban on all vintage cars manufactured before 1940, a one-of-its-kind collector’s item smuggled out of the country went on the auctioneer’s block in London.

The car, a 1912 Brook Swan, was the property of the Maharaja of Nabha till at least August 1990, when an official of the Vintage and Classic Car Club of India (VCCCI) had seen it. It was made by a Suffolk company of marine engineers, J.W. Brooke and Co. in 1912 for an eccentric Englishman “Scotty” Mathew- son.

Designed to outclass the cars commissioned by maharajas to their own specifications, the carved wooden swan bodywork contained eyes made of coloured prisms and a beak, with a compressor which hissed and spewed boiling water from its nostrils to clear pedestrians ahead of the car. But hissing was by no means its entire repertoire of sound. Using a two-way valve exhaust system, Mr. Matthew-son enabled a Gabriel horn, with eight organ pipes and a keyboard, to be installed.

The car is to be auctioned by Brooks, one of the four main car auction houses in Britain, the other three being Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Coy’s.

Another jewel in the Nabha automotive treasury is ‘a 1912 Rolls Royce Silver Ghost (Roi de Belgis), .There are apprehensions that this car has also been smuggled out of the country.

The commerce in vintage and classic cars is big business abroad. The collective valve of these “two “card according to the records set in past sales, can be conservatively estimated at 1.2 million pounds (R.s 4.4 crore approximately). As local prices cannot match this figure, smuggling these cars to foreign markets is a lucrative business.

This is not the first in- stance of a priceless vintage finding itself in the international market place. A number of cars have been exported from Calcutta port and some have exited across the border into Nepal. Two cars, both early 1920s, a Farman, (ex-Bhagalpur and last in the possession of a former mill tycoon in Bombay) and a Rolls Royce 20 HP — both aluminum bodied, custom built and priceless, are now believed to be abroad.

 A Phantom II saved

In fact, an alert Bombay customs officer apprehended a 1932 Rolls Royce Phantom II, formerly be- longing to the Maharaja of Baroda, which was sought to be wrongly declared as 1942.

 It was only on June 6, 1972 that the Government of India banned the export of all cars built before 1940. The latter is the year when almost all manufacturers switched over to the war effort, bringing auto- mobile production to a halt. This is the cut-off year for the vintage classification.

Since then, there have been periodic moves by vested interests to influence export and import pol- icy framers to remove the cars from Appendix II, which expressly prohibits the exports of vintage cars. In 1988, vintage cars were transferred to Appendix III allowing export on ‘merit.

Article extracted from this publication >> July 19, 1991