On a Sunday morning in April 2022, a hurried meeting was called at Our Lady of Miracles, a church on a small hillock in Badem village, a close-knit community of 45 houses in Assagao, in North Goa’s Bardez taluka. After Mass, the priest asked the parishioners to settle down. Christina Dias, 53, a lawyer and local resident, then laid bare an elaborate plot that had been quietly unfolding around them.

Badem was the target of a criminal conspiracy, she said, one of the many villages across North Goa where vast tracts of land had allegedly been grabbed by real-estate agents in connivance with government officials. But it was what Dias told them next that shook the gathering: the dead had been signing sale deeds in the village for years, and over half of its properties had already changed hands.

As complaints poured in from Calangute, Parra, Anjuna, Pilerne, Nerul and other villages in Bardez taluka, on June 15, 2022, the Goa government formed a seven-member Special Investigation Team (SIT), headed by the Superintendent of Police (Crime).

According to land deeds, revenue documents and case and court records reviewed by The Indian Express, the land grab was part of a plot allegedly hatched by a group of real-estate brokers who used a trove of 500-year-old Portuguese-era land records to allegedly forge property titles.

Now, as parallel investigations by the SIT and the Enforcement Directorate (ED) continue, the scam has emerged as one of the largest land grabs in the state. At the heart of the investigation are 117 properties spanning nearly 1.5 lakh sqm across North Goa, an area equivalent to 21 football fields.

The scam was spun through three key loopholes: a largely Catholic population whose members had migrated over generations, leaving homes empty and unguarded; a real-estate boom that sent land prices in villages soaring; and an Archives department with poorly monitored and maintained records.

In 2022, constituting an SIT in the state “for the first time ever to investigate matters of illegal land grabbing”, Goa Chief Minister Pramod Sawant said, “This has been happening for the last 20 years and it’s happening more over the last 15-20 years. Some people live abroad. Their properties are being illegally transferred to someone else… Goa, being one of the most sought-after destinations, has been the target of such criminals involved in illegal land grabbing.”

The SIT is probing 52 cases and has made 91 arrests, including of six state government officials.

Dodgy surveys, bouncers

It was in early 2022 that residents in Badem started spotting “outsiders” surveying properties in the village: labourers fencing and clearing land, and contractors “threatening” owners.

Speaking to The Indian Express, Dias, the local lawyer, pointed to property 78/2, where, in 2022, bouncers had allegedly set up sheds on a 18,500 sqm plot. Case records show the property was originally owned by Domingos Vincente De Souza and Maria Quitera De Souza. After their deaths, it had passed on to their children.

The revenue records, however, told a different story. A sale deed purportedly executed on February 19, 1934, claimed the original owners sold the property to a couple, Antonio Martinho Diniz and Antonia Francisca Pereira. The document showed Domingos to be unmarried at the time. Except, in 1934, Domingos had been married for years. His youngest child Mary was born in June that year.

Another deed claimed the property was sold, bizarrely, to the same couple again in 1951.

Dias also spoke about property 39/6, co-owned by her relative Anacleto Vincent Monteiro. Revenue records, however, reflected a mutation proceeding with a new set of owners. Dias filed an objection and obtained certified copies of the mutation proceedings through RTI. The documents claimed Dias’s relative Monteiro, Miguel Arcanjo de Souza and other co-owners had executed a sale deed on November 26, 1951, in favour of the ancestors of the new owners.

But, as Dias pointed out, Miguel had died in April 1951, nearly six months before “signing” the deed. Monteiro was 15 years old in 1951 and only became a co-owner through inventory proceedings in 2000, she said.

“It was shocking to learn that my dead relative Miguel returned from his grave to execute this deed of sale,” Dias said.

Anacleto Monteiro’s son Ashley, 50, remembers attending the church meeting. “Everyone was concerned. We were told that a set of people were trying to grab our ancestral properties through fraudulent means. The property was bequeathed to my father through inventory proceedings. It was shocking to hear that it had been sold by some third party, based on a forged sale deed. When the sale deed was supposedly executed, some co-owners were dead. How did the dead sign deeds?” he asked.

Then, there is the case of “Aframento or Quinze Adicoes”, a property in Badem spanning 2,942.5 square metres co-owned by Matilda Leopoldina Coutinho on the western portion and Eliterio Anthony Carvalho on the eastern portion. The western portion had been gifted to Matilda’s husband Simon Paul Coutinho by Jose Pedro Coutinho and his wife Maria Anton D’Souza via a deed of gift in 1974. The eastern portion was recorded in the name of Maria Joaqueina Carvalho and Pascoal Carvalho. Yet, a sale deed dated June 25, 1996, claimed the two women — Maria Anton D’Souza and Maria Joaqueina Carvalho — were “married to each other” and had jointly sold the property to one Diago Roberto Rodrigues. Maria Joaqueina Carvalho had died in 1991, five years before the purported transaction.

Advocate Augustus Monteiro, who was helping villagers compile the list of targeted properties, learnt that his own family property in Anjuna was on the radar. A purported sale deed from 1951 showed his wife, mother-in-law and sister-in-law as joint owners of eight properties in Anjuna and that they had ‘sold’ them to one Antonio Pereira. His mother-in-law, Esperenca Oliveira, was 12 years old in 1951 and had been listed in the deed as the daughter of her father-in-law. His wife and sister-in-law were not even born that year.

Tucked in a valley between Anjuna and Siolim, Badem is a largely Catholic village with old houses bearing Goan balcaos (covered front porches), courtyards and laterite stone walls. Over the years, as many residents migrated abroad, their homes remained vacant. Paddy fields have given way to large villas, driven partly by an urban elite relocating to Goa after the pandemic and the resulting real estate boom.

After the church meeting, Dias asked every resident of the village to check the occupants’ column in Form 1 and XIV (documents with details of property ownership) in the revenue records on the Goa government’s Directorate of Settlement and Land Records website. Her team of eight then began quietly conducting inquiries at the offices of the mamlatdar and sub-registrar. They rushed to the Department of Archives and Archaeology in Panaji and found that more than half of Badem’s properties had allegedly been sold off by ‘dead ancestors’ to fictitious people using forged deeds and fraudulent mutation proceedings.

Soon, boards went up across Badem: “Private Property. Not For Sale. Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted.”

A conspiracy in the archives

According to Dias, inquiries at the Department of Archives and Archaeology revealed that records had been tampered with. Pages 13 to 19 in book number 551, volume 328 of 1951, had been inserted and loosely bound with string; they were also shorter than the rest of the pages. An internal inquiry by the Archives department found that two genuine sale deeds had been removed from the register and four fake ones inserted, through which 45 properties had been targeted across Bardez taluka.

“The dates of the deeds were not in chronological order, the pages of some deeds were shorter than the other pages in the books. There was a difference in handwriting. The paper quality, the shade of ink were different, there was a mismatch in the signature of the notary,” Dias said.

With the scam exposed, the SIT made its first major arrest a week after it was formed in June 2022 — Vikrant Shetty, a 48-year-old real-estate broker. More arrests followed, including of Mohammed Suhail alias Michael, who is named in at least 13 FIRs and identified as the ‘mastermind’, and Rajkumar Maithi. While Suhail is in jail, Shetty and Maithi are out on bail.

The ED, meanwhile, initiated a money laundering probe in July 2022, filing a prosecution complaint against 36 accused in 2024 and attaching properties worth over Rs 535 crore. Subsequently, the ED has filed four more prosecution complaints.

In a disclosure statement, Suhail, the ED claimed, allegedly admitted to illegally acquiring more than 100 properties in Goa in the names of friends and associates over the last 15 years. Born in Chitradurga, Karnataka, the 49-year-old had dropped out after the third year of a BE programme in Honnavar and worked in his father’s tailoring business before turning to real-estate brokerage.

Dismissing the ED’s allegations, Advocate Ritesh Rawal, who is representing Suhail, the main accused, said, “The matter is sub judice. Whether these statements [disclosures] are valid or not, or whether they can be corroborated, is a matter of trial. The ED proceedings are dependent on trial in the predicate offence. If the accused is proved to be innocent in the predicate offence, then there can be no PMLA conviction that can be attracted.”

Advocate Vibhav Amonkar, who has represented Suhail’s co-accused Shetty and Maithi, said, “The material at this juncture is highly insufficient to call anyone a mastermind. The investigation is ongoing and the trial will take its own course.”

According to a senior police officer who was part of the SIT, the accused first identified vacant, unattended or dilapidated ancestral properties owned by people with common Goan surnames such as Fernandes, Rodrigues and D’Souza.

The gang then allegedly obtained ownership and title information of properties from government offices, websites and the Registo de Agrimensor, a register maintained by Portuguese-era land surveyors.

Next, they turned to the Archives.

During the Portuguese regime, and for some time after Goa’s liberation in 1961, land deeds of all kinds were registered with notaries under the continental system of registration. In 1963, the powers of registration were transferred to sub-registrars and notary ex-officios under the Law Department, who took over the registers of deeds and wills from the old notaries. These books were subsequently handed over to the Department of Archives and Archaeology, which is today the custodian of archival records. The department holds over 3.2 lakh bound volumes, files and loose manuscripts containing approximately 3 crore folios, with the earliest record dating back to 1498.

Suhail allegedly told the ED that two sorters in the Archives department were paid Rs 15 lakh each to provide documents and pages of notarial books. The sorters would allegedly tear the original pages from the notarial books, and insert the new documents, showing forged sale deeds, in their place.

But the forgery required skill of a rare kind. The notarial deeds were typically in Portuguese and the forged pages, with details of the property changing hands, had to resemble the original script. According to the ED prosecution complaint, Suhail allegedly roped in his nephew Denver D’Souza, who was proficient in Portuguese, to reproduce the script. D’Souza also allegedly translated the Portuguese documents that were then used to draw succession deeds at sub-registrar offices, charging around Rs 15,000 per page. D’Souza is yet to be arrested.

According to the ED, the main accused allegedly approached three Goan residents — Royson Rodrigues, Sandric Fernandes and Caetano Fernandes — and collected their personal documents, along with that of their ancestors, to forge succession records and land documents. The fabricated documents allegedly showed that the actual owners had long since sold the properties to the ancestors of the Goan residents. The mastermind then approached the sub-registrar offices at Canacona and Ponda to get succession certificates.

Suhail also told investigators that three mamlatdars assisted him and were paid Rs 8 lakh in cash per property mutation.

Advocate Anoop Gaoker, who is representing Royson, Sandric and Caetano, said, “The matter is sub judice before the courts.”

While the investigation continues, back in Badem, the ordeal is far from over for Ashley Monteiro and other residents. “Though the properties are attached, the names of the original owners are still not reflecting in the revenue records. We are now forced to run from pillar to post to restore ownership and possession of properties which were snatched from us. I lost my father in 2024. He was a heart patient and all this stress took a toll on him,” he said.

Across the village, the boards are still up: “Private Property. Not For Sale. Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted.”

SCAM IN A NUTSHELL

Target properties: Identify vacant properties, mainly with absentee or foreign-based owners; collect title details from govt offices, surveyor registers\

Forge land deeds: Fabricate Portuguese-era sale deeds, showing original owners selling to accused’s ancestors. Bribe Archives department staff to insert fake pages into notarial books, supply certified copies

Establish inheritance: Use forged deeds to obtain fraudulent succession certificates from sub-registrar offices, impersonating legal heirs of fictional buyers

Fudge & sell: Bribe local revenue officials to delete original owners’ names from revenue records and substitute the accused’s associates. Execute nominal first sale deed to legalise the title, sell to unsuspecting buyers