Name: Abdul Aleem Khan

DoB: 05-03-1972

Education: Government College Lahore

Constituency: PP 147 (Lahore IX) and NA 127 (Lahore X)

Government Position Held: Punjab Minister for IT

Previous Election Results:

Election Party Ticket Total Votes Main Competitor Lost/Won By 2002 General NA 127 PML Q 20,545 Tahir ul Qadri (PAT) Lost by 9,404 Votes 2003 By-Elections PP 147 PML Q 18,059 Ameer ul Azeem (JI/MMA) Won by 4,130 Votes 2008 General NA 127 PML Q 13,707 Naseer Bhutta (PML – N) Lost by 39,895 Votes 2008 General PP 147 PML Q 9,493 Mohsin Latif (PML – N) Lost by 20,327 Votes

Bio

Abdul Aleem Khan is an ‘Entrepreneur’ who owns multiple property/construction concerns around the city including Park View Housing Scheme. He is the Chairman of the Vision Group. He also dabbled in the media business by launching an Urdu Language newspaper ‘Waqt’ that was later acquired by the Jang Group.

Aleem Khan first got infamous in Lahore immediately after he took over the Park View Housing Society that was plagues by scandals and land scams. Even though this scandal was small compared to Aleem Khan’s land grabbing of Railway Lands which he leased from Railway on a 99 year lease to sell them off later as individual plots, the Park View Scandal became headline news much faster. The Park View Housing Scam was one of the largest and well documented scams in Lahore’s recent past.

What happened was this. Abdul Aleem Khan took over a nearly defunct housing society called Park View. Park View was originally envisioned as a housing society back in 1987 by a couple of partners who sold plots within the housing society. They promised that it would be completed by 1992, but when that was not done, restructuring happened within the society and as a result of it, Abdul Aleem Khan took over the never constructed housing society. It was at this point that plans for the new Airport in Lahore were announced and as the society was opposite the airport, the prices of plots that at one time were 60,000 PKR for a Kanal sky rocketed to about 4 to 5 Million.

Seeing this opportunity, Abdul Aleem Khan cancelled plots of over 130 people for allegedly not paying development charges in the society. In addition to that Abdul Aleem Khan added two new extension blocks and started selling them as well without mentioned the fact that the extension to the Park View Housing Scheme was not attached to it but were in fact half around the city near Jullo Park. In addition to this, in his attempt to acquire more land, Abdul Aleem Khan was implicated in a murder case when he along with his men tried pressuring people of Malikpur village to sell their land on the cheap.

Based on these antics, Aleem Khan is commonly known as ‘THE LAND MAFIA’ and the ongoing joke for many many years is that ‘Lahore doesn’t need Land Mafia, we have Abdul Aleem Khan’. He is the main accused in Railway Land Lease Scam concerning the Garhi Shahu Land Development which is all originally owned by Pakistan Railway.

And now, the Abdul Aleem Khan with this glorious past has been ‘elected’ as the Lahore President of Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf. That itself is irony at its best, the LAND MAFIA now heads Movement for Justice in Lahore.

Refernces:

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_26-8-2004_pg7_28

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_16-12-2004_pg7_21