Kingfisher House’s fifth auction is no show, again

Mumbai: State Bank of India’s (SBI) fifth attempt to auction Vijay Mallya’s 17,000 sq. ft. Kingfisher Airline corporate office in Vile Parle turned out to be a no show as not a single bidder was present on Wednesday.

The bank had fixed a reserve price of Rs 93.5 crore for the Kingfisher House. SBI’s financial arm, SBI Capital had announced earlier this month that it would hold the auction on May 31. However, senior SBI officials said that the auction did not get any response.

The bank had set Monday as last day for submitting Earnest Money Deposit (EMD) of Rs 9.35 crore for participation in the auction.

An SBI official, who did not want to be named, said, “The fifth auction at a base reserve price of Rs 93.5 crore, too, did not find any takers. We expected that after successfully auctioning Kingfisher Villa in Goa, we could gain confidence in potential bidders but we will now have to see what can be done to assure auctioning of Kingfisher House in future.”

In April 2017, a group of 17 banks, led by State Bank of India, sold the Kingfisher Villa for Rs 73.01 crore to Sachiin Joshi of Viiking Media & Entertainment, after having failed to auction it thrice since last year.

Real estate experts have, in the past too, cited that Kingfisher House’s auction would not be successful.