Staff Report
ISLAMABAD: The Supreme Court (SC) on Wednesday rejected an application from Bahria Town seeking a three-year delay in the payments of a penalty if had agreed to pay for the underpriced acquisition of land in Karachi.
The real estate group in March last agreed to pay Rs460 billion for the land acquired for Bahria Town Karachi in the Malir district in return for a restraint on the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) that sought to file references against the developer for grabbing prime land at throwaway prices.
In a petition filed Tuesday, the developer sought to freeze the payment plan in view of Covid-19-related recession, requesting that the payment of Rs2.5bn monthly instalments be deferred for three years till September 2023. A three-judge bench headed by Justice Ijazul Ahsan heard the application filed by senior counsel Syed Ali Zafar on behalf of the developer and its chairman Malik Riaz Hussain.
The counsel for developer argued in the court that businesses the world over had been devastated due to the pandemic and according to economic reports, hundreds of thousands of people had been rendered jobless.
He suggested that the group’s operations had been badly harmed by the economic downturn as well.
