ISLAMABAD: A private company owned by Pakistan President Asif Zardari and his son Bilawal Bhutto purchased 307 acres of prime land in Islamabad in March, valued at government price of over Rs2bn, for a mere Rs62m, proving after a long wait that the 1997 accountability reference against Zardari for the same deal was justified, but had to be dropped then for lack of some missing links.

The deal, The News reported here yesterday, which Zardari was accused of in 1997, was thus completed this March, 15 years later, after a complex process of legal cases, suits and counter-suits, between a person once declared by the then government as a front man of Zardari, another person believed to be closely associated with the President and a private company that is jointly owned by the President, his son and a few others.

Documents and legal papers, including the sale deed and court judgments given by the Islamabad High Court, the report said, prove that a Karachi-based private company, Park Lane Estates Pvt Ltd, purchased almost over 300 acres of land near Sangjani from Faisal Butt, who himself purchased the land from a Pakistani-American living in the US, Nasir Khan, for merely Rs62m.

Khan was the original purchaser of this land in 1994 and was declared to be the frontman of Zardari in the Ehtesab (accountability) Bureau reference filed against him in 1997.

The latest officially Capital Development Authority-assessed price of similar land, adjacent to the land in question, is Rs850,000 per kanal. If the Park Lane land is assessed on the basis of the rate fixed by CDA, its market value would be around Rs2 billion for the entire lot.