Reeled in: Kapadia

The two white Ambassador cars that pulled up at Malabar Hill's Hyderabad Estate, residence of Mumbai's senior bureaucracy, at 6 a.m., could easily have been mistaken for those of officers leaving early for work. The occupants who trooped up to the 14th floor and saw a locked door thought they had missed their target despite a six month vigil. But they hadn't. The pony-tailed middle-aged occupant of the flat who returned from his morning walk turned ashen when the CBI officials flashed search warrants.

Bankim Kapadia, 50, chief producer, Films Division (FD), knew this was the beginning of the end. Hours later, he was to have addressed a press conference kicking off the seventh Mumbai International Film Festival (MIFF) where he could have boasted of a turnaround in the fortunes of the flaccid FD during a three-year stint. Instead, Kapadia now faces charges of accepting illegal gratification and possessing assets disproportionate to his known sources of income.

Crime

ACCUSATIONS > Gave contracts mainly to those who gave him bribes. > Responsible for alleged misuse and sale of the FD's archival footage. > Charged with owning assets disproportionate to his sources of income.

Simultaneous raids on his office and four flats in Mumbai revealed Rs 6.5 lakh in cash, investments, property worth nearly Rs 1 crore and incriminating documents. According to the fir, Kapadia with his two former wives, Mala and Ragini Nigam own a duplex flat in Navi Mumbai, a swank Bandra apartment, a flat in Malad and a three-acre plot near Lonavala. He had also floated two trusts, the Kamakshi Trust and the Srividya Sansthan where his ex-wives are trustees. More skeletons tumbled out of Kapadia's closet-love letters, a dozen photographs of nude women and photographs of him in the buff in a bath tub.

Crime

THE MASTERMIND Omar Saeed Sheikh, the main suspect in the kidnap of American journalist Daniel Pearl, is a London School of Economics graduate. The Pakistani police are hunting for the 27-year-old east London boy after three of his accomplices were arrested in Karachi last week. FBI agents who took part in the arrests believe that Sheikh has close links with the Al Qaida and could have helped finance the September 11 hijackers. Back in 1994, Sheikh hit the headlines when he was captured along with members of a Kashmiri militant group which had abducted British tourists in India. Subsequently, militants who hijacked an Indian Airlines jet with 154 passengers on board on Christmas Eve in 1999 and flew it to Kandahar had secured the release of Sheikh and other Kashmiri activists in a deal brokered by the Taliban. Sheikh, whose parents still live in Wanstead, London, is believed to have sent e-mails threatening the life of Wall Street reporetr Pearl. He was educated at the Forest School in Snarebrook, where England cricket caption Nasser Hussain was a contemporary.

While it is for the Mumbai Police to investigate whether he misused his position for sexual favours and whether there are links with the underworld in his property transactions, the CBI's anti-corruption branch is probing Kapadia's tenure. From the handing out of contracts for digitisation to the purchase of stock and outdated equipment, there was a percentage for him on every transaction. Evidently, the loss-making division could still line many pockets.

The FD sits on a treasure trove of archival footage, some 8,000 documentary films made in the 54 years of its existence. A lot of the corruption revolved around misuse of this collection. Footage was sold illegally. Money was also made on kickbacks in the digitisation of the archive. Besides, Kapadia is alleged to have handed out contracts to companies at rates twice those being quoted and asking for a cut of up to 20 per cent. In one case, Kapadia asked a processor to cough up a "signing amount", then asked him to jack up his quotation with a bait of digitising five lakh reels of footage for Rs 1 crore. "The autocratic Kapadia," says the aggrieved processor, who claims to have paid him a kickback of Rs 6 lakh, "was the last word. There was no second opinion on what he said." Officials who protested against his excesses were served transfer orders. According to his colleagues, complaints of corruption against him, which kept piling up in the Information and Broadcasting (I&B) Ministry, were ignored. There was a murmur that he was shielded due to his good relations with political bosses in the ministry.

The thrice-married man who had a steep and dizzying climb to the Film Division's topmost post, equivalent to the rank of joint secretary, has a bumper sticker on his grey Ford proclaiming: "I'm a mystic, transcendentalist and a natural philosopher to boot." But if his colleagues are to be believed, he is not much of a filmmaker. "In a two-year stint at the Films Division, Mumbai, he made exactly two films,'' says one.

When his contract as chief producer expired and the Central Administrative Tribunal shot down his appeal for an extension, Kapadia petitioned the high court which gave him a stay order asking him to continue until the Government appointed a replacement.

Two years ago, the Geethakrishnan Committee report recommended the closure of loss-making wings of the I&B Ministry, including the NFDC and the FD. The government is yet to accept this, but as filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt says, "The continuation of these organisations leaves them open to many more such scandals."