Richard Littlemore insists his new book, City Builders: The Maleks, The Olympics, and a Historic Gift to Vancouver, commissioned by the Malek brothers themselves, is a work of fact. That’s despite the tale of the speedy building of Olympic Village—and the municipal government maneuvering by Gregor Robertson and Vision Vancouver that accompanied it—seeming like something out of a John Grisham novel. It’s also despite former city councillor Geoff Meggs straight up telling the Vancouver Sun in a recent interview that the book belongs in the fiction section. “I stand by everything in this book with the same confidence of anything that I’ve written over the last 30 years,” says Littlemore, a veteran Vancouver writer who has worked for the CBC, Metro Vancouver and a variety of other publications and organizations. The book is essentially a biography of Vancouver developers Peter and Shahram Malek, who fled Iran with their parents when they were kids, leaving behind their father’s real estate empire. In Vancouver they built up a reputation, and were entrusted by the City to build 12 square blocks in Olympic Village in 30 months before the 2010 Winter Olympics. After the project’s initial backer got into trouble during the 2008 financial crisis, the city became the development’s sole funder. The Maleks came through with the project but were four percent short on the loan payment, says Littlemore, resulting in the City putting the brothers’ company, Millennium Development Corporation, into receivership (a process that involves a third party taking control of a company or property). That meant that the City took over the selling of the 480 units left in Olympic Village. It then transferred that responsibility to accounting firm EY. “What the City did to them was punitive, outrageous and unnecessary,” says Littlemore. “The only explanation was political advantage.” The City was the project’s regulator and the financier, explains Littlemore. “They started to say, ‘OK, you have to do everything we say.’ And they piled incredibly onerous green responsibilities on the project,” he continues. “The Maleks got through all of that but when it was all done they couldn’t sell enough to make it work, and came up short on the loan payment.” According to Littlemore, EY “wound up discounting and bulk selling it, which the City didn’t let the Maleks do.” The City then took title to 32 properties, valued at about $45 million, as part of a settlement agreement. “At the end of it, [the City] came out with a balance sheet and had a big celebratory press conference,” Littlemore says. “In order to break even, they basically gave away all this property. The only argument [for it] was that they did it before an election was coming.” Before the 2014 municipal election, Vision Vancouver was able to portray the project—which looked doomed at one point—as a success. Littlemore talked to some City Hall figures, including former mayor Sam Sullivan, but couldn’t get former city manager Penny Ballem or former mayor Gregor Robertson on the phone. “I made every attempt I could to get to Gregor and got no positive response,” he says. Littlemore is convinced that Vision put the Maleks into receivership for political gain, while former Vision employees like Meggs contend that the party simply saved taxpayers from taking on a significant burden. Littlemore says that the Maleks have since been able to salvage their reputation, with large developments in places like Gastown, Burnaby, and North Vancouver. “They’re very old-world gentlemen who stay the hell out of the limelight and prefer it that way,” he says. “The city took them out at the kneecaps and they were able to bounce back.” In the end, Olympic Village stands as a monument to the difficulty of getting housing built in this city. GS Richard Littlemore is conducting a lecture on April 8 at SFU’s downtown campus entitled Development of Olympic Village & the Maleks: Trials, Tribulations & Triumph.