A housing society launched to provide low-cost residential plots to Pakistan Peoples Party’s workers in Hyderabad continues to haunt the so-called allotees who keep complaining about being defrauded by their counterparts in the PPP. Mehran Cooperative Housing Society (MCHS) Action Committee and the PPP’s workers at a press conference at Hyderabad press club on Monday urged the party’s leadership to take notice and to refer the matter for a probe by the anti corruption officials.
“Poor workers of the PPP have been robbed off their earnings in the name of low-cost plots,” said the committee’s office bearers Kamal Shah and Muhammad Solangi. “The party should take strong action and recover the tens of millions of rupees which have been deposited for allotment of plots by the workers.”
They recalled that the former CM Qaim Ali Shah had announced in 2011 the establishment of a housing society for poor workers of the party in Hyderabad’s Ganjo Takkar area. The initial layout plan shared with the workers consisted of plots measuring 120, 240 and 400 square yards for which the allottees were asked to pay Rs24,000, Rs48,000 and Rs80,000, respectively.
However, the provincial government never allocated land for the scheme in question. Yet some local leaders who were made in charge of the housing project began collecting payments from the allottees. “Around Rs160 million to Rs170 million have been collected from the workers,” Shah claimed.
Shah, Solangi and others at the press conference blamed incumbent chairman of the cooperative society, Abdul Razzak Bhatti, and general secretary Abdul Rehman Ansari for the alleged ongoing fraud.
Bhatti and Ansari could not be contacted for their versions. Allegations about fraud with the PPP workers seeking plots in the hitherto non-existent scheme started as early as 2014 and 2015. The former chairman of MCHS late Amanullah Siyal, who was also district vice president of the PPP, in 2015 rebutted the allegations, claiming that the ex-CM had allotted 500 acres of land near Husri town of Hyderabad on Tando Muhammad Khan road.
He had even claimed that Rs24.2m had been paid to the revenue department in two installments against which 100 acres of land was handed over to the society.
