One Year on: Crown of Taj Cinema to be decided by court

All the roads and arteries leading towards Lahore’s Garhi Shahu area echoed with the sirens of ambulances and fire trucks when a fire erupted in one of the city’s oldest cinema, the Taj Cinema, on June 7 of the last year.

All the interior structure of the historical cinema was gutted down before the appearance of the firefighters. Two people were injured while valuables worth millions were completely ruined.

As the first anniversary of this dreadful incident is inching closer, Pakistan Today visited the actual site of the cinema and found that all the debris, rubble and remains of the fire are laying there unchanged, picturing as if the fire erupted only yesterday.

Originally known as the Taj Cinema, the property was given to the Cinestar on lease by Alia Asad on June 17, 2013 for a period of nine years and it became the Cinestar-Taj Cinema’—well-equipped with the latest technology.

The documents obtained by Pakistan Today from different sources revealed that the tenants of the cinema-the Cinestar got Rs 50 million in insurance claims while the landlord of Taj Cinema is still waiting for its tenants to renovate the devastated property.

“We made a lease agreement in 2013 with Faraz Chaudhry, who is brother-in-law of Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf’s central leader Aleem Khan, and serves as a director of CineStar,” said Affan Taj, who is son of Alia Asad, the original owner of the Taj Cinema.

But after the incident, we were duped by the CineStar as they got a hefty amount of Rs 50 million in insurance claims; and they deliberately did not disclose the details of insurance policy despite the fact that we were the original owner of the property and it was our property that was badly damaged, he added.

Taj was of the view that he requested the CineStar and Faraz Chaudhry multiple times to sit with him in order to sort out any solution regarding his burnt property as it was the responsibility of the CineStar to return the property in its original condition but they did not pay heed towards his apprehensions and kept on lingering the matter.

“My concerns increased when I came to know the malafide intentions of CineStar through a friend of mine that the CineStar has secured an insurance policy with IGI insurance and a hefty amount of Rs 36,750,000 has been transferred in the account of CineStar on October 7, 2016,” he said.

According to Taj, he then approached the civil court of Lahore for obtaining a stay order against the transfer of remaining insurance policy amount and the court granted him a restraining order on October 28, 2016.

The insurance company completely ignored the court’s order and issued the remaining amount of Rs 13,248,000 by forging a back date in its record, evident from the bank cheque, as October 27, 2016 was the date mentioned on it and it was hand written, he added.

“I am sure that the CineStar in connivance with the IGI insurance deliberately put the cinema on fire to secure the insurance claim, as a fire policy was obtained from IGI specifically in the month of April 2016, just two months before the fire,” he said.

The matter is sub-judice as Taj’s mother has filed a petition praying the appointment of an arbitrator to decide the matter under the section 20 of The Arbitration Act, 1940 in the civil court, Lahore.

According to the reply of CineStar submitted in the court and available with Pakistan Today, the said property of Taj Cinema was not in the sole ownership of Alia Asad as a series of litigations related to that property are still pending in the courts and they deliberately concealed this fact from the CineStar, which makes the lease agreement null and void. “The sole arbitrator proposed by them is a brother of Alia Asad’s late husband and they also concealed this fact from us, therefore the proceedings of arbitration cannot be held in an impartial manner,” the Cinestar submitted its reply before the court.

The CineStar told the court the cause of the fire was the vulnerable gas connections installed inside the premises under the ‘New Butt Sweets’ shop and they had requested the landlord time and again to remove those connections, but in vain. “We got the insurance claim of our equipment and machinery that we installed in the cinema and we have nothing to do with the building of the cinema,” CineStar stated in the court.

However, Taj said that Mian Hamid Miraj, a senior PTI leader and good friend of both Aleem Khan and Faraz Chaudhry, was made the sole arbitrator in the lease agreement and it was Faraz who asked to do so. “Frankly speaking, they approached us to sign the lease agreement via Mian Hamid and now they themselves do not own him,” Taj told this scribe. Yes, we have some property litigation in the family but we are the sole owner of this property and the court has granted us the license to run this cinema in 1999, he said.

Taj was of the view that fire did not erupt from the gas connections installed at the New Butt Sweets; had the fire erupted from the Butt Sweet, it would have ruined the shop but the shop remained safe.

“We are in the cinema business for decades and we know very well the cost of the machinery installed in the cinema. It was hardly an investment of 20 million but they got 50 million as an insurance claim,” he said. As per the lease agreement between the two parties, an amount of 11.11 per cent will be depreciated each year from the machinery installed by the CineStar and they will be left with no equipment after nine years when the agreement would have expired.

“It is a form of modern organised corporate crime that is carried out with the connivance of the Insurance Company, and the mafia behind it must be unearthed,” Taj said.

When Pakistan Today tried to get the version of Faraz Chaudhry, director of CineStar, he refused to comment on the issue by simply saying that the matter is sub-judice.

The next hearing of the court is scheduled on May 27, (Saturday) this month.