City Builders

The Maleks, The Olympics, and a Historic Gift to Vancouver

By: Richard Littlemore

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eBook | 7 March 2025

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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.