Up a river without a paddle

River Edge sounds like a serene place in England, nestled by a flowing blue river and on a land populated by forever green foliage. It isn’t. It is, in fact, a highly contested and controversial housing society located along the wide and very industrial-looking Multan Road, a little further from Thokar Niaz Baig. The object of much hope and some excitement, the project is not known as River Edge anymore, but has expanded onto the riverside, and on agricultural land owned by the government. 

At the beginning of the 2000s, this area of ​​Multan Road and Ferozepur Road was becoming very attractive for new housing societies. The population of Multan has been booming and people have been optimistic about moving to new housing societies and have more space around their homes. The River Edge housing society was kickstarted as a project by a developer named Ammar Khan in 2004. Two years later he got approval from the Lahore Development Authority (LDA) to begin his work. At that time the total land owned by this society was approximately 765 kanal as per documents.

 When questioned about the project, LDA officers are unwilling to talk about River Edge and are afraid to go on record because now the owner of the society is not Khan anymore. After much pressing, an LDA official who wishes to remain anonymous agreed to speak to Profit. 

 According to this official, a company named Vision Developers Private Limited, owned by Abdul Aleem Khan, bought River Edge in 2010 and immediately renamed it Park View Villas, another wonderfully evocative name. 

“There’s no harm in changing the name but for this it is necessary to take a legal procedure and get approval from the LDA. It is not that the LDA did not receive requests regarding the name change, the paperwork was complete but the said society could not get approval because it was the era of PML-N,” said the official. 

He also added that Aleem Khan had a lot of influence in the LDA and that the officers were both eager to meet him and work for him in some capacity. “Aleem Khan… had been the provincial minister for information technology in the Musharraf regime, in 2008, he was also an unannounced and unwritten owner of an Urdu daily and he is a big name in the real estate world. Even today, if no officer in LDA speaks against Khan, one of the reasons is that his operatives fed LDA officers and clerks a lot.” The fact that despite being influential he was unable to get approval, is of course, testament to the lack of planning by Khan’s own people. 

So then what is the official name of the project? Nobody seems to have any clarity. And if this was the only problem we could have moved on from here. But there is a lot more. 

 “If the issue was only about changing the name of the project, it might have been resolved 10 years ago, but here the issue was shifting the project to the riverside and on some government land which included agricultural land in the area. No government officer can help anyone in such cases,” said the official. 

  According to him and other sources in the industry, in 2012, Vision Developers requested the LDA to extend the project in the Revised Master Plan of the Authority. “Since the said housing project was also including agricultural land in the project area, the LDA refused to extend it.” Next, Park View Villas presented its case to the then Secretary Housing Punjab who also made it clear that the said project is being built on a green area according to the LDA master plan of 2004, which by virtue of being old and later revised cannot be allowed. “It should not be extended even an inch beyond 765 kanals,” he said.

 Sources state that the LDA considered going to the police to file criminal cases against the project. Park View Villas bought and sold plots without the approval of the LDA and didn’t stop despite advertisements published by the authority in various newspapers against it in the year 2012. Now, 10 years later, the story is still gaining momentum. In a recent press conference, Mian Aslam Iqbal, senior minister in Punjab also responsible for housing and urban development, said that stay orders were issued but despite these “Aleem Khan continued to develop his housing society illegally.” He added that “the LDA has issued 17 notices to his society from 2010 to 2022.”

 Iqbal showed copies of these notices to journalists in the press conference and said that Aleem Khan continued undeterred, sometimes naming his project Park View Villas, sometimes Park View and sometimes Park View City.

 “An LDA director, wishing to remain anonymous later wrote a detailed response which is still part of court proceedings, stating that Park View was selling land to people and siphoning off money without having the authority to develop even an inch. In the year 2012, when LDA took action against Aleem Khan’s society, Khan’s people opened fire and at the same time a deputy director of LDA left the country out of fear. An FIR was also registered for the entire incident, which was later settled,” the minister added.

 “There has been an overselling of 10 to 15 thousand plots in this society,” he said. “All constructions on such land are illegal. LDA has issued about 13 advertisements against them in newspapers from 2012 to 2022 saying that it is an illegal housing society and the investor will be responsible for his own loss,” he said, adding that “in this project, people have built houses inside the riverbed, which is a place where floods occur.” 

It was also revealed during the press conference that previously, Aleem Khan had grabbed 55 kanals of the Irrigation Department’s land and included it in the Park View project. This land has been retrieved though. 

Furthermore, despite the many legal challenges it has faced, the housing society has managed to operate with such impunity that it is now one of the major sponsors of the Pakistan cricket board.  “Overseas Pakistanis are affected by such fraud and marketing stunts, and invest with such people. What will happen to the poor person who has taken a two-marla or three-marla plot in this housing scheme? This project is a scam of more than Rs 50 billion. Now that the area has come under the domain of Ravi Urban Development Authority (RUDA) and when the authority took action against them, their armed men tortured government staff,” he revealed.

 What happened between RUDA and Park View? 

 The spokesperson of RUDA said that on September 26, the authority had launched an operation to take action against all illegal housing schemes within its limits.

 “When our teams launched an operation against Park View in Mohalinwal area (which falls under RUDA’s domain), our teams were prevented from working. Later, the Park View management instructed their goon elements to attack our team; more than 100 people attacked the RUDA team and the assistant commissioner, took them hostage and then subjected them to severe torture,” he said, adding that 10 employees were seriously injured while the driver of the assistant commissioner was rendered unconscious due to head injuries.

Despite these fear-inducing tactics, CEO RUDA, Imran Amin stays firm. He said that no individual would be allowed to challenge the government writ. “According to RUDA’s Master Plan, housing societies which are illegal will not be approved. A case has been registered against the goons who attacked the RUDA employees and they will be dealt with iron hands,” he said.

 RUDA’s sudden action against illegal housing societies has been met with surprise. In recent meetings held by Profit, CEO RUDA has repeatedly said that illegal housing societies will be given opportunities to seek approval from the authority. No action was taken by RUDA against illegal housing societies for the last three years, and there are more than 74 illegal societies in its domain. Action should be taken against everyone but if operations against these societies are on the basis of political distinction, then nothing can stop the cropping up of illegal societies.

 An official of Park View Housing Society said on condition of anonymity that the action taken was purely political vendetta. 

 “The system of getting approvals for societies is outdated. Developers have to pay bribes worth millions of rupees to LDA. If this project was illegal then why wasn’t action taken when Aleem Khan was part of PTI. PTI was in power in Punjab for more than three years, so why was such an operation not conducted against us,” he asks. “No one is questioning the credibility of those conducting this operation,” he lamented further.

 Park View Society has remained silent throughout. No one officially seemed ready to comment on the issue, however, former member of the Punjab Assembly, Shoaib Siddiqui, held a press conference to explain the position of the Society and state that 762 kanals of land were approved by LDA. Siddiqui said that the first phase has been approved; the permission of the second phase is being sought and more than 4,000 homes have been constructed. “We will continue to develop Park View with our partners. It is being maligned because it is giving millions of rupees to the landlords. You [Aslam Iqbal and RUDA] cannot turn off Park View using these methods. We will protect every penny of Park View’s millions of members and fight in courts for the rights of landlords and farmers,” he stated emphatically.

 Siddiqui said Iqbal started the operation illegally. “Iqbal sent the police in the dead of night, cameras were broken and workers were abused. We have taken the matter to the court and will ask the High Court why this operation was done after the prohibition order.” Iqbal took the bulldozer on the request of a fitna [Imran Khan], said Siddiqui, and started demolishing the society. “This is political revenge and Imran Khan is worried about who will run his expenses?” he said.

 Has the Park View Housing Society market petered out?

 There is no doubt that the recent action of RUDA and the press conference of the provincial minister has had a profound impact on the housing society market. At the moment, sellers of Park View project files are hiding from customers. A property agent selling files for the project told Profit that he had been off work for the past week and was at home.

 “I don’t know if the project was legal or not but I know for sure that whoever I sold the file to got the plot. Now people are talking about all kinds of things. They are asking us questions and many people want to get their files back. From the day RUDA took action on the project site, our files are closed for purchase and sale,” he said.