City Builders

They built the world a stage. Then City Hall tried to bury them.

When Peter and Shahram Malek fled Revolutionary Iran as young men, they lost everything their father had built. Decades later, rebuilding in Vancouver, they delivered one of the most admired feats in Olympic history: an 80-acre, 1.5-million-square-foot Athletes' Village, built in under three years, in time for the 2010 Winter Games — through the worst global financial crisis in a generation.

Then the City that celebrated them pushed their company into receivership and took almost everything but their homes.

City Builders is journalist Richard Littlemore's on-the-record account of what really happened to Millennium Development Corporation — drawing on the Maleks' own records, told with their direct cooperation, and reconstructing a fight that pitted two resilient developers against the very government that was supposed to be their partner.

Inside, you'll discover:
How the Maleks rebuilt a fortune twice — first in Iran, then in Canada — before either was fortyThe real financing story behind Vancouver's Olympic Village, and the four percent shortfall that triggered receivershipWhat the City did with the seized project, and what it left out of its own accountHow Millennium Development continues to shape Metro Vancouver today
For readers of Canadian business history, civic-power narratives, and anyone who watched the 2010 Games and wondered what happened after the cauldron went out — City Builders is the story Vancouver didn't want told.

Read it, and decide for yourself who the real city builders were.