By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: A retired army colonel who serves as vice chief executive of Bahria Town was convicted on Thursday for a second time in less than a year, this time for illegally moving money abroad to finance projects for the sprawling real estate developer, as investigators continue to unravel a financial network built around one of the country’s most powerful property empires.
Additional District and Sessions Judge Nasaruminallah Baloch found Colonel (retd) Khalilur Rehman guilty alongside hawala operator Imran Kaka and property dealer Mushtaq Ahmed, sentencing each man to one year in prison and a fine of Rs500,000. The judge delivered the verdict after hearing closing arguments from prosecutors and defense attorneys.
Prosecutors had argued that the three men funneled money out of the country through informal channels rather than authorized banks, in violation of the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act. The funds, according to the case laid out in court, were intended for various Bahria Town developments.
The conviction lands just months after the same judge handed Rehman a far heavier sentence in a separate case — one that has come to symbolize the mounting legal pressure facing Bahria Town and its founder, billionaire developer Malik Riaz.
In that earlier case, brought under the Anti-Money Laundering Act of 2010 and built on an investigation by the Federal Investigation Agency’s Anti-Money Laundering Circle, Rehman was convicted of laundering roughly Rs1.6 billion. Judge Baloch sentenced him to 10 years of rigorous imprisonment, fined him Rs25 million, and ordered the forfeiture of assets purchased with the laundered proceeds.
In her written judgment in that case, the judge described a scheme in which transactions were deliberately layered and routed through third parties to obscure where the money had come from — a pattern she characterized as proceeds of crime being methodically disguised. She wrote that the scale of the laundering, the coordinated nature of the transactions, and the absence of any mitigating factors justified the maximum sentence available, given the economic damage such schemes inflict on the broader public.
Thursday’s verdict is the latest in a string of legal setbacks for Bahria Town, whose vast residential developments have made Riaz one of the country’s wealthiest and most controversial businessmen. The National Accountability Bureau has spent recent months tightening its grip on the developer’s assets as part of a broader anti-money laundering investigation.
On Monday, NAB seized physical control of the Bahria Icon Tower in Karachi, a skyscraper valued at approximately Rs100 billion, marking one of the most significant moves yet in the bureau’s case against Riaz.
That followed action in May, when NAB froze 3,150 acres of land in Jamshoro district that had been acquired for Bahria Town projects, along with a 67-acre villa belonging to Riaz’s son, Ali Riaz. That same month, the bureau froze four other high-value Bahria Town properties on orders from an accountability court.
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