Rizwan Sajan and Danube Group: Founder Profile and the 1% Payment Plan

Rizwan Sajan is the founder and chairman of Danube Group, a Dubai-based group in building materials, home products and, through Danube Properties, residential development. The early-life details below come from interviews he has given to Gulf News and other outlets. Accounts differ on some dates, which we note.

Early life and career

• He was born in Mumbai. His father died when he was a teenager. Gulf News says he was 16; another interview quotes him as saying 12.
• He used a small amount of his father’s savings to start a business making box files, which YourStory and Danube’s own material, citing Forbes India, describe as selling well while he still struggled to make ends meet.
• His uncle then offered him a job as a trainee salesman in Kuwait, at 150 Kuwaiti dinars a month, rising later to 1,500. The start year is given as 1981 in one source and 1982 in another.
• After Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990 he returned to Mumbai. He has described himself as being “back to zero”.
• He came to Dubai around 1991 to 1992, according to different Gulf News pieces, and took a job at a hardware business. He founded his own trading company in 1993. Danube’s own account says the name came from a trip to a timber factory in Romania.

The group

Danube began as a building-materials trading firm. The property division, Danube Properties, was launched in 2014 as the group’s residential development arm. Details of the group’s other businesses are on the company website.

The 1% payment plan

Danube Properties is best known for a payment plan that is widely associated with Sajan. As described in company and trade material, buyers pay a 10% booking amount and then 1% of the purchase price each month during construction, with the remaining 40% to 50% paid after handover. Buyers can in some projects move in after paying around 65% of the price.

A caution for buyers: one independent buyer guide notes that the headline price on such a plan can be higher than a comparable unit on a conventional plan and that payments can continue for about 30 months after handover. Anyone considering a purchase should read the contract and compare total cost.

Net worth and rankings

Several websites give his net worth as about $2.5 billion, but we could not find a primary source such as a Forbes profile that states it, and other sites give different numbers. We therefore do not report a net worth.