Liaquat Ali Khan Qaimkhani was recently arrested by the National Accountability Bureau for his alleged involvement in the allotment of the Bagh Ibn-e-Qasim land to Bahria Icon Tower and embezzlement of billions of rupees in KMC’s park funds in his tenure from 1986 to 2011.
Qaimkhani is from Jhuddo, a city in Mirpurkhas district. He was first appointed as an assistant director in KMC’s parks department during the tenure of former prime minister Muhammad Khan Junejo in 1986. His first residence in Karachi was KMC’s quarters near Gutter Baghicha.
Qaimkhani then moved on to the post of director-general of the parks department. He held the post from 2001 to 2011. Naimatullah Khan Advocate and Mustafa Kamal served as the City Nazims during this period.
He was honoured with the Tamgha-e-Imtiaz in 2008 and Sitara-e-Imtiaz in 2011 while PPP was in power.
Bagh Ibn-e-Qasim has been inaugurated twice: first by former president General (retd) Pervez Musharraf when Kamal was city nazim in 2011 and then recently in March, this year by Prime Minister Imran Khan with Karachi Mayor Wasim Akhtar.
In 1988, when he was working for KMC as an assistant director, Qaimkhani purchased a 2000 square yards plot in Karachi’s Pakistan Employees Cooperative Housing Society at an estimated cost of Rs1.4million.
The grade-20 officer retired from the post of parks director-general in 2011 and was serving as an “adviser” to Karachi Mayor Wasim Akhtar in recent days.
On Friday, in a brief media talk, Akhtar had said that Qaimkhani was not a ‘notified’ adviser.
Before his arrest, NAB and the Anti-Corruption Establishment conducted an inquiry against the former parks director-general for involvement in embezzlement of Rs30 million worth of KMC’s funds in 2003 and 2013 respectively.
Two of his brothers, Aftab Qaimkhani and Sohail Qaimkhani, are serving as the KMC Sports Complex director and KMC estates additional director respectively.
Sources told SAMAA Digital that two of his nephews, Faisal Qaimkhani and Talha Qaimkhani, are working on the post of deputy director in KMC’s enterprise and investment promotion department.
They said that the former parks director-general recruited over 150 employees of his native town in KMC’s parks and horticulture department, adding that more than 100 nurseries of Karachi are under his control through contracts given to his blue-eyed contractors.