D Company Looks For A New CEO

THE INSIDE STORY: Sensing winds of change, an ageing Dawood Ibrahim is preparing to make way for a successor. Five candidates are up for the top job, including his deeply religious son and a savvy son-in-law. The Week looks at the gathering succession storm in the D Company, and how its outcome depends on the powerful lieutenants who now run Dawood’s corporate-like criminal empire

- Namrata Biji Ahuja

Shaikh Dawood Hasan turned 65 on December 26 last year.

He is the patriarch of a large, prosperous family in Karachi, but there was no celebration or even a family gathering on his birthday. His house—D-13, Block 4 at Clifton, an affluent seaside neighborhood in the city—is guarded by plainclothesmen. But the house has been quiet for some time; its residents are away.

Five feet and six inches tall and of medium build, he appears clean-shaven in his passport photograph, quite remote from his grisly persona. Before he came to Pakistan as a fugitive and changed his name in the 1990s, he was better known as Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar. For nearly three decades, Hasan aka Dawood has been ‘eluding’ intelligence and security agencies across the world, despite the United States had declared a $25-million bounty on his head for his role in the 1993 Bombay blasts.

Though Dawood has long been India’s most wanted man, he travels around the globe under aliases without being caught at immigration points. The D Company, which he started in the 1980s, was a smuggling, murder, and extortion syndicate. Today, it is a corporate empire with multiple verticals looked after by separate managers. It is spread across Asia, Africa, Europe, and even North America, with distinct wings that run guns, plant bombs, print fake currencies, buy and sell real estate, run factories, smuggle drugs and kill people.

Indian agencies have discovered that Dawood is not in the pink of health. He has blood pressure-related problems, and there were rumors that he had contracted Covid-19. Sensing that the times are changing, Dawood is apparently keen to pass on his shady empire to capable hands.

The big question is: who will succeed him?