Authorities investigate auction Virginia company held event at Blue Hill

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BLUE HILL – The Hancock County Sheriff’s Department is investigating local concerns over the “Perry Como Estate” auction in Blue Hill last weekend.

The department has received several calls from area residents who attended the auction, Detective Alan Brown said Tuesday.

“We’ve had three or four calls,” Brown said. “The main concern was that there was a misrepresentation of what was being offered at the auction.”

The advertisement for the auction, which ran in a number of area newspapers, including The Bangor Daily News, said it would include “a beautiful collection of furniture and fine art from the Perry Como Estate,” identifying Como as the star of radio, recordings and television. People who attended the auction on Saturday were told there were just two items from the Como estate, neither of which was presented by auctioneer Gulshan Oberoi, a contract auctioneer working for the Park Royal Galleries of Sterling, Va.

It is still early in the investigation, according to Brown.

“I still don’t know enough yet,” Brown said Tuesday. “I need to try to figure out whether any criminal conduct took place or if this was just a case of poor work.”

This is a familiar method of operation for Anwar Khan, whose credit card was used to pay for the ads in the NEWS for the auction, and it has gotten him and several of his relatives in trouble in at least one other state in the past, according to an Oregon official. The ad was placed on behalf of Park Royal Galleries of Sterling, Va.

Oberoi also has seen his share of troubles in recent years.

In an October 2000 agreement with the North Carolina Auctioneer Licensing Board, Oberoi voluntarily and permanently surrendered his North Carolina auctioneer license, according to the board’s Web site.

Oberoi, who holds an active Maine auctioneer’s license, allegedly held an auction without a valid license in North Carolina, engaged in unprofessional conduct, obtained or attempted to obtain compensation by fraud or deceit, failed “to possess truth, honesty and integrity sufficient to be entitled to the high regard and confidence of the public,” and advertised a house without intending to offer it for sale, according to the North Carolina Auctioneer Licensing Board Web document.

Park Royal Galleries Ltd., the Virginia-based auction company that sponsored the weekend auction in Blue Hill, also has had problems in other states. The gallery was fined $3,000 in January for violating Virginia laws regarding truth in advertising, according to a report published on the Web site of the Commonwealth of Virginia Auctioneers Board.

The board also found that Park Royal Galleries had violated the law requiring that auctioneers and auction companies keep their records for four years and make them available for the board’s inspection; and for violating or inducing someone else to break Virginia laws, the board report states.

Calls made Sunday and Tuesday to the company’s headquarters in Sterling, Va., were answered by an answering machine that did not identify the firm or any of the staff, simply saying: “We are unable to take your call at this time” and directing callers to leave a message.

In Oregon, the state’s Attorney General’s Office has been dealing with Anwar Khan and other members of his family for almost two decades, according to Jan Margosian, a spokeswoman for the Oregon Department of Justice.

Anwar Khan’s Fidelity First Financial Corp. had operated for a decade under a court order because of past violations of the state’s Unlawful Trade Practices Act, Margosian said Tuesday. Other members of his family, including brother Salim Khan and cousin Babur Mohammed Khan, also are operating in Oregon under similar injunctions, she said.

A.M. “Ozzie” Khan, also related to Anwar Khan, is named as the founder of Park Royal Galleries, according to the gallery Web site, and a Samia Khan is the company’s marketing executive.

Anwar Khan had been operating in Oregon under a 1993 court order to change the “misleading method in which his company advertised carpet auctions,” according to a November 2001 media release posted on the Oregon Department of Justice Web site.

The release announced that the Multnomah County Circuit Court had permanently restrained Khan and Fidelity First from misrepresenting the source of goods or their affiliation with other persons or businesses.

“Promises to change unlawful advertising of carpets and other products such as prints and furniture were oftentimes ignored,” Attorney General Hardy Myers said in the release. “Under the new court order, he must comply or we will put him permanently out of business in Oregon.”

Investigators with the Oregon Department of Justice found that Khan’s “latest advertising gimmick of holding auctions in connection with the sale of multi-million home” violated the agreement the auctioneer had signed. An ad that ran in connection with a July 2001 auction misled the public into thinking faux art, furniture and carpets auctioned were connected with the family selling the estate and therefore gave Khan’s auction items added worth, according to the press release.

The judgment also requires Kahn to submit all advertising materials to the attorney general’s office in Oregon for approval before they run, Margosian said.

“I think we’ve seen one ad and we made him make changes,” she said. “He’s not operating as much in our state any more.”

Maine law also regulates auctioneers operating in the state. The state statute defining minimum standards of practice for auctioneers requires that the “auctioneer shall not intentionally misrepresent in any advertisement the terms, conditions, merchandise and/or the nature of the sale.”

Anne Head, director of the Maine Office of License and Regulation, which oversees approximately 40 professional boards in Maine, said her office has not received any complaints about Saturday’s auction in East Blue Hill.

If she had, Head said, she would not be able to discuss it.

State statute requires confidentiality in complaints to the state’s Professional and Financial Regulation Department, according to Dennis Smith, an assistant state attorney general who works regularly with the department. If someone files a complaint, he said, it remains confidential until the case is dismissed or set for a hearing.

Ellsworth attorney Ray Williams, the chairman of the state Board of Licensing of Auctioneers, also said he could not discuss the auction or any complaints that might have stemmed from it.

“The board would not see any complaints until they were investigated and presented to us by the board complaint officer,” Williams said.

The Attorney General’s Office also has not received any complaints about the auction, Smith said on Monday.

That could change after Detective Brown completes his investigation.

Depending on what evidence his gathers, Brown said, he probably will turn the information over to the Attorney General’s Office.