Indian Ambassador Sanjiv Arora (centre) during a press briefing at the embassy premises yesterday. P S Sasi Kumar, deputy head of the mission at the embassy (left), and Jatin Pathak, acting head of the ICBF, are also seen.
DOHA: Some Indian tenants of a newly-opened mall on the Airport Road have accused a fellow Indian of collecting huge deposits from them while allotting shops earlier this year and refusing to return the cash at the end of a promised deadline.
The tenants approached the Indian embassy yesterday and raised the issue during an open house, which is a monthly event where the mission invites aggrieved Indians to report their woes for redress.
The open house was presided over by Indian Ambassador Sanjiv Arora and present were P S Sasi Kumar, deputy head of mission, and Jatin Pathak, acting head of a community welfare corpus. Later, during a press briefing Arora confirmed in reply to a question that some fellow Indian tenants of a mall had indeed come complaining.
“It’s basically a complaint. We will follow up,” Arora said, while one of the aggrieved tenants who gave his name as Murtuza Parihar told this newspaper after the open house that the embassy had asked them to lodge a formal complaint.
Parihar said he and several other tenants had paid deposits running into tens of thousands of riyals to a fellow Indian who represented a company that had taken the mall on rent to sublet the shops.
Following a row, though, the tenants were now dealing directly with the mall owner and had inked fresh tenancy contracts so the fellow Indian was out of the picture, claimed Parihar.
“We want our deposits back from him,” he added, hinting that the man had been refusing to part with cash despite the fact that it was a
refundable deposit.
Victims of the mall agent (from left) Murtuza Parihar, Ashok Sen and Pooja Moorjani talking to the media at the Indian embassy premises after an open house yesterday. Salim Matramkot
Attempts by this newspaper to contact the Indian accused by his compatriots of not refunding their deposit amounts failed as he didn’t pick the phone.
Parihar said they would soon be filing a formal complaint with the embassy.
Arora, meanwhile, citing figures said at the briefing that some 194 Indians had died in Qatar so far this year (from January until yesterday). Of this, he said 84 died due to heart attack.
He said worksite accidents had claimed the lives of eight Indians so far this year while the number of compatriots who perished in road accidents totaled 32.
Some 50 Indians were at the central prison while those awaiting repatriation at the deportation centres totalled 229 until last Wednesday.
Embassy officials had visited the prison and the detention centres on Wednesday to enquire the welfare of fellow Indians there, said the envoy.
Pathak said the Indian Community Benevolent Forum will be holding a medical camp in the Industrial Area next month and low-income workers from all nationalities would be welcome to attend. The Peninsula
