Lahore: SC summons bigwigs in pleas against high-rises

[Naveed Yaseen]

A FULL bench of the Supreme Court of Pakistan on Monday sought the personal appearance of the Punjab Chief Secretary, the Lahore District Nazim and the Lahore Development Authority (LDA) Director-General in a case of illegal construction of high-rises in the city.

The bench, headed by Justice Khalil-ur-Rehman Ramday, and comprising Justice Fakir Muhammad Khokhar and Justice Syed Sakhi Hussain Bokhari, summoned them for Tuesday (today).

The bench has been hearing a set of petitions against hundreds of plazas, shopping malls and commercial sites in the city since 2006. At the start of Monday’s hearing, legal adviser to LDA, Aslam Butt gave the court a copy of a proposal of formation of a committee to check the illegal construction of buildings in city.

The bench took a serious notice of the proposed committee and termed it an attempt to avoid and bypass a court-appointed commission, headed by a former Lahore High Court judge, Justice Riaz Kiyani, and comprising experts on the matter to detect and assess illegalities and deviation from the rules and regulations in the construction of commercial sites.

Justice Ramday observed that instead of following the court order, the LDA had resorted to form the committee, adding that the court would seriously deal with the issue. Justice Ramday also took a serious notice of non-appointment of a structural engineer by the LDA despite an order by the court in 2006. Justice Ramday observed that he had assumed his office after a gap of two years but the LDA had not yet complied with the court directions.

The Director Town Planning told the court that a requisition for the appointment of a structural engineer was moved to the Punjab Service Commission where the matter was pending. However, the director failed to answer a question about the number of commercial buildings in the city.

Taking up the matter of a plaza at the junction of Beadon Road and Cooper Road, whose construction was previously stayed by the court, the bench sealed the building and ordered the SHO Qila Gujjar Singh police to deploy a guard at the site.

Advocate AK Dogar representing Muhammad Saleem Yasin, owner of the plaza, pleaded that his client was developing the site by using loan from bank and the stay in question was unduly burdening him with heavy interest.

According to the counsel, the commission had wrongly found faults with the ownership of the site as an aunt of his client, who died on September 21 and had no children, had gifted her three marla land, which was included in the plaza, to the petitioner on July 5.

Justice Ramday said the lady was issueless and apparently, no legal heirs were there to take over the property and it was a state property under Article 173 of the Constitution.

The court was also provided with a report of the District Officer (Revenue) showing the plaza also covering government land. The court asked the petitioner to obtain a valid civil decree of succession in his name from a court of law before praying for relief.

http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=174709