Court sends two property developers on seven-day remand

Two property developers accused of extorting millions of rupees from the public in the name of a housing scheme were handed over to the corruption watchdog on a seven-day physical remand on Thursday.

A National Accountability Bureau (NAB) team had arrested the accused Rauf Ahmed Rufi and Manzoor Ahmed Rufi, owners of Rufi Builders and Developers, late Wednesday night in a raid in Gulshan-e-Iqbal, according to NAB Deputy Director Rizwan Soomro.

Rauf and Manzoor were presented before an accountability court on Thursday, which remanded them to NAB’s custody for seven days. Sharing details of the case, Soomro said that Rufi Builders and Developers had launched a housing project named Rufi Global City on a 45-acre piece of land on Main Super Highway and had invited applications from interested citizens to book a house and pay the amount in instalments.

According to Soomro, the two men are accused of denying possession to allottees who had booked houses and paid instalments and also of exhorting money from the public by fraudulently booking houses which had already been booked by others beforehand.

Soomro said that the Rufi Global City had allotted 415 houses and had received all instalment payments from buyers some 17 years ago, but when the buyers demanded possession of their houses, the builders denied them.

Moreover, the men are also accused of extorting money by selling houses that already had been sold to other people before. He added that all houses in the project had more than one file and now the file holders were fighting for possession.