The Catholic Minority Welfare Society has formally escalated the Pannur land fraud to the highest authority in the Salesian Congregation with certified government records that leave the Chennai Province no room to manoeuvre. The Salesian Chennai Province has had every opportunity to respond. They have chosen not to.
For over a decade, a pious Catholic family has watched their ancestral land, donated in good faith for a rural engineering college, become a private housing colony marketed under the name Antony’s Dreamscape. The family first broke their silence in an open letter accusing the Chennai Salesian Province of eleven years of cheating and blackmail, followed by a formal demand for a Congregational Enquiry into the actions of former Provincials. A Don Bosco alumnus subsequently wrote to the Vatican Nuncio naming forgery and fraud, and CMWS filed formal complaints demanding a Congregational Enquiry from Rome. Through all of it, the Salesian Chennai Province has not said a word publicly.
Now CMWS has gone to the very top, directly to Fr. Fabio Attard SDB, Rector Major of the Salesian Congregation in Rome, with certified copies of every registered sale deed. The complaint, signed by S. Jesuraj, President, and S. John Sundar Raj, Joint-Secretary of CMWS, carries a single demand: the immediate removal of Fr. L. Don Bosco as Provincial.
The Chennai Salesian Province Never Had Any Intention of Building That College
What makes this scandal different from ordinary institutional corruption is the sheer openness with which it was executed – as though those who orchestrated it never expected to be questioned.
On 20 August 2013, the donor family’s Gift Deeds were registered, transferring 8 acres and 51 cents of ancestral land to the Pannur Don Bosco Society for the stated purpose of building a rural engineering college. On that same day, a General Power of Attorney (Doc No. 5501/2013, SRO Thiruvalangadu) was secretly executed handing complete disposal authority over the donated land to a private builder – M/s. Antony Projects Pvt. Ltd., Kilpauk, Chennai.
The charitable college was never built. It was never going to be built. The Province did not stumble into a bad arrangement. They walked into it with the paperwork already prepared.
The registered sale deeds carry a further detail that reads as institutional contempt. Mr. R. Senthil Kumar appears as Witness No. 1 in the first five Bhandari sale deeds. Less than three months later, he returned to the same Sub-Registrar’s office as a buyer, purchasing the single largest block of the project through four sale deeds on a single day (Documents 944, 945, 946 and 947 of 2014, dated 26 February 2014). The witness to the first sales became the principal purchaser in the same scheme.
Throughout the entire disposal chain, a single individual Rev. Fr. Arokiya Doss, Secretary of the Pannur Don Bosco Society both signed the GPA granting the builder his authority and personally issued every Life Certificate approving each subsequent sale. No independent oversight. No committee. No check of any kind. And across all nine verified sale deeds, the named seller is the Pannur Don Bosco Society, registered before the Government of Tamil Nadu. The Province cannot claim ignorance of a single transaction.
A Provincial Above Accountability
Before approaching Rome, CMWS wrote formally to Fr. L. Don Bosco, the current Provincial, under Ref. No. CMWS/2026/001 – naming him as the individual alleged by the donor family to have drafted the document that stripped all charitable conditions from the donated land on the very day of the donation and demanding written responses to four specific questions within seven days.
Fr. Don Bosco has not responded. No acknowledgement. No denial. No expression of concern. It is that silence that CMWS cites as the reason for going directly to the Rector Major.
CMWS has demanded his immediate removal pending an independent Congregational investigation, the appointment of an outside Visitator with full access to all financial records and transaction documents, a full public accounting of the proceeds from all twelve sale deeds, and the unconditional honouring of the Archbishop of Madras-Mylapore’s mediated settlement of October 2022 – under which the Province agreed to return equivalent land to the donor family, a commitment abandoned without explanation three and a half years ago.
The housing project that stands today on the donated land is called Antony’s Dreamscape, named after the builder whose company collected the sale proceeds and whose son witnessed the GPA. A congregation built on Don Bosco’s love for the poorest children received a family’s ancestral land, disposed of it to a private builder on the same day it was donated, and watched a housing colony take the builder’s name.
That name is the most honest thing about this entire affair.
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