‘House grabbers’ – a new mafia targeting expats

Islamabad : With a police system as old as almost 150 years, drafted and implemented by the colonial rulers with specific objective to suppress the indigenous population and a legal system equally fraught with lacunas, loping heavily in favour of criminals, one need not be surprised that we are living in a society completely controlled by all sorts of ‘mafias’.

There is ‘contraband drug mafia’ infusing poison in veins of our youth as well as the ‘medicinal drugs mafia’, controlling the supply and prices of medicines. There is ‘arms/ammunition mafia’, spreading illegal weapons in the society and there is ‘land mafia’, blatantly grabbing private as well as state lands. There is ‘truckers mafia’, that has crippled the goods train operations on one hand and destroying the road network all over the country and there are networks of ‘crime mafias’ all over the country, blatantly hurting innocent people and openly challenging the police. You name any sphere of life and there is a ‘mafia’ present, running the system.

And now yet another such ‘mafia’ has surfaced and that is which grabs the properties of Pakistanis living abroad.

There may not be many such houses or vacant residential or commercial plazas and plots in Islamabad, or say all over the country, but the number is not too meagre to completely overlook. And, even if there is only one such incident, that will not mitigate the intensity of the crime.

However, this scribe, during prolonged investigations, have found out that this trend of grabbing overseas Pakistanis’ properties is not a new phenomenon and sporadic incidents had occurred in Islamabad in the past as well.

But the worrying aspect is that now the number of such houses, plots and commercial buildings/plazas owned by overseas Pakistan has increased a great deal as compared with the past. And the number of such incidents in which this ‘home grabber mafia’ has taken over the possession and has even got the property transferred in their name has also grown in numbers.

The modus operandi is simple. These property grabbers quietly rent a house or a building owned by a Pakistani living overseas who is not visiting the homeland very frequently. There are some cases in which the owners don’t come to Pakistan for over a year and prefer to receive rental through bank transactions on yearly basis.

This is enough time for these people to forge documents of ownership of property and as they are already in possession of the building, be it a home or a commercial building, they stop paying rental. When the lawful owner realises the situation and comes to Pakistan to regain possession of his or her property, they first used intimidating tactics, will issue serious threats ranging from physical violence to even murder. If the owner has powerful connections and contacts here, they would eventually engage him in litigation.

They know the legal system well and as such cases take years to get settled and also know that these overseas Pakistanis cannot stay here for a longer period of time to deal with the cases in the court of law, they manipulate the situation in such a manner in which these overseas Pakistanis always find themselves at the losing end.

There are dozens and dozens of such cases where members of this property grabbers group have succeeded.