The Office and The Fraud

When I first arrived in Karachi I was advised by my uncle to not establish a whole fledged office in the beginning, rather to get a few employees and get them started from my new place. There were 2 problems with this, firstly it is illegal to use any property in the Defence residential area for commercial use, simply put you cannot setup any sort of business at home and secondly a lot of employees would see it as very unprofessional and on top of that the Colonel from downstairs had already warned us about not setting anything up at home.

So I began the search for an office. This like the portion took about a month. Unlike the UK where we take a lot of things for granted, the basics had to be inspected, this includes water, electricity and general maintenance. Soon after I found a small office on a mezzanine floor in a place called Rahat commercial area, which is close to our portion. We settled the amount and were about to sign the papers with the owner, when the owner aka Akhtar Gul told us he had another shop in a place called Tawheed Commercial Area, which was bigger and in a better location. All he wanted was an extra 15 quid per month.

We went to see the place, the biggest mistake we made here was not to bring the estate agent with us, and in fact Akhtar Gul asked the agent to stay at the office and said we will be back in 15 minutes, we trusted the guy, and so we went along with him.

When we got there it all seemed like a good deal. The only problem was with the bathroom; it had no water. Akhtar Gul informed us that he had turned off the water valve upstairs and would get it started immediately. We went back to the office and signed the agreement and handed over 2 months deposit and 3 months advance rent.

We left the keys for the shop with him, so that he could get the water problem and cleaning sorted.

5 days later we contacted him, to check on the work, turns out the guy has gone and installed a water tank in the bathroom and was expecting us to fill up the tank on a regular basis, which would end up costing us more. When we inquired about the water coming from the line, he said that it wasn’t working and tried to make excuses, this severely pissed us off, there was a lot more involved and really got to us.

We decided to withdraw from the deal and after a lot of meetings and arguments, and just to free ourselves form this bloke, we let him keep 2 months rent even though we hadn’t even taken the keys in to our possession. Finally we freed ourselves and approached the same estate agent who found us a portion.