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Thursday June 27, 2024

Fazaia Housing Scheme probe: Suspects say ready to pay back looted money

SHC ordered freezing the bank accounts of Fazaia Housing Scheme after NAB began a probe into fraud

By Web Desk
April 11, 2020

The suspects in the Fazaia Housing Scheme fraud case submitted a petition to the Sindh High court on Saturday, contending that they are ready to return the amount back to the allottees.

The Sindh High Court (SHC) has ordered freezing the bank accounts of Fazaia Housing Scheme till further orders after the National Accountability Bureau began a new probe into the alleged fraud.

Suspects Chaudhry Tanvir and Bilal Tanvir were earlier arrested in relation to the probe. After the submission of their petition, the SHC sought an answer from NAB in the inquiry of the housing scheme.

The court said that it wanted to know about NAB’s response regarding the return of the money, as claimed by the suspects, to the affected people.

SHC had ordered the freezing of the bank accounts after the allottees submitted a petition against the builders.

The petitioners said that they were allottees of the housing scheme and they were not being given possession of the land despite the payment of installments worth millions of rupees. 

The counsel for the plaintiffs produced details of the booking and installment of challans.

NAB probe

NAB had earlier said that their inquiry revealed that the FHS had been illegally launched by the Pakistan Air Force (PAF) in partnership with Maxim Properties in 2015 on an illegally consolidated or adjusted land in Deh Allah Phihai located in District Malir’s Taluka Shah Mureed.

The NAB prosecutor said that in accordance with an agreement with the PAF, the construction company sold various units of the scheme to the public and collected billions of rupees in the name of booking, allotment, and development of housing units of the said scheme.

However, added the prosecutor, since 2015 the management of the FHS has neither handed over the plots to the allottees nor carried out any significant development work, so the public stand cheated out of their money.

Tanvir Ahmed and his son Bilal Tanvir were also signatories to the agreement with PAF officials regarding the launching of the FHS and involved in the sale of its units to the public, said the prosecutor, claiming that the petitioners along with the co-accused had collected Rs18 billion from 6,000 people affected by the fraudulent scheme.