A significant land fraud has been exposed within the Lyari Expressway Resettlement Project (LERP) in Karachi, where thousands of unauthorized residential and commercial plots were created, resulting in losses amounting to billions of rupees to the national treasury.
LERP Project Director Shafique Ahmed Shah has formally requested the Sindh government to annul roughly 9,000 residential plots along with an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 commercial plots that were illicitly carved out of public land. This request was made in an official memorandum addressed to the Additional Chief Secretary of Sindh’s Local Government & Housing and Town Planning (HTP) Department.
In a significant development, the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) is currently investigating the case. Shah highlighted persistent irregularities concerning the excessive and unauthorized creation of plots within various LERP schemes.
Initial surveys and inspections revealed that these illegal plots were established by encroaching upon and reducing essential public infrastructure, including green belts, service roads, public amenity spaces, and open utility areas. The financial loss attributed to the residential plots alone is estimated at around Rs15 billion based on current minimum market values.
Notably, the financial impact of the commercial plots is even greater, pushing the total valuation of the scam beyond Rs16 billion. The land-use violations were initially identified in a Special Audit Report by the Prime Minister’s Audit Team, which pointed out significant deviations from approved urban planning standards.
Following directives from NAB Karachi, further physical verifications and site inspections were conducted to assess the extent of the irregularities. The project director has urged the provincial government to promptly initiate a departmental review aimed at canceling the fraudulent allotments, restoring the original urban planning designs, and protecting state assets.
The LERP initiative, valued at billions of rupees, was originally launched to relocate and resettle thousands of families displaced by the construction of the Lyari Expressway, a major highway corridor running through Karachi.
