LAHORE: The National Accountability Bureau (NAB) on Thursday arrested an individual allegedly involved in the Fazaia Housing Society fraud and presented the individual before an accountability court in Lahore for obtaining judicial remand.
According to a statement released by the accountability body in this regard, the suspect, identified as Muhammad Hafeez, stands accused of fraud by luring unsuspecting citizens into the housing scheme. The suspect is the brother of scheme owner Saleem Hanif.
According to NAB, Hafeez and Hanif were together involved in scams worth huge sums of money that affected at least 1,016 people affiliated with the housing scheme. “The administration of the scheme is allegedly involved in corruption worth Rs2 billion,” the bureau claimed.
Hanif is already under NAB detention. According to the bureau, Hafeez was arrested after it was found that he was the owner of a company contracted to carry out development works, worth huge sums of money, for the housing scheme that were never completed.
Earlier this month, two of the arrested suspects in the Fazaia Housing Scheme fraud case submitted a petition to the Sindh High Court (SHC) in which they stated that they are ready to return the money back to the allottees of the scheme.
The SHC had ordered freezing of the bank accounts of Fazaia Housing Scheme till further orders after the National Accountability Bureau began a new probe into the alleged fraud related to the scheme.
Suspects Chaudhry Tanvir and Bilal Tanvir were earlier arrested in relation to the probe. After the submission of their petition, the High Court 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 money, as claimed by the suspects, to the affected people. SHC had ordered freezing of the bank accounts after the allottees submitted a petition against the builders.
The petition 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 booking and installment of challans.
