Amin Visram remembers the joy of his childhood in Uganda: games of marbles, badminton, the laughter of his friends.
And he remembers seeing his breath condensing in the cold air when he and his family landed in Canada as refugees after being thrown out of the country they called home.
That was in 1972, when Uganda's former dictator, Idi Amin, expelled 55,000 South Asian residents from the East African country.
Almost all of them scrambled to flee, with only a few hundred well-connected Asians staying on.
The 9,000 or so properties they left behind, which were expropriated by the state, were some of the most valuable real estate, and are still being fought over, 50 years on.
Lawyers, officials and Ugandan Asians described a tangle of forged documents, corruption and endless court cases.
There are even conflicting accounts of exactly how many unclaimed properties remain.
Visram, who was 13 at the time of the expulsion said,, said in the 1990s his family gave power of attorney to a businessman in Uganda to recover and manage the properties.
The family received US$5,000 for one house, which they consider inadequate, and nothing at all for the other two, and the businessman was accused of large-scale fraud by a parliamentary inquiry published last year.
The property saga highlights endemic corruption in Uganda, which was ranked 144 out of 180 countries in Transparency International's 2021 Corruption Perceptions Index.
Amin was ousted in 1979.
The abandoned Asian properties — some taken over by soldiers, others occupied by tenants who paid rent to the state — were a crumbling reminder of his rule.
In 1983, a new government enacted a law allowing former owners to reclaim their properties, handing stewardship of the process to the Departed Asians Property Custodian Board, a government agency.
But restitution only really got going in the 1990s, when the World Bank made it a condition of lending and president Yoweri Museveni, who remains in power, began courting Asian investment.
The properties were worth an estimated US$1 billion at the time.
Yet in the rush to return the properties, some "crooks" crept in, said Dan Wandera Ogalo, a lawyer who has represented the Custodian Board in court.
Many of the Asians expelled in 1972 never returned to Uganda after Amin's ouster, granting power of attorney to others to reclaim properties on their behalf.
Much of that depended on "rampant corruption" at the Custodian Board during the 1980s and 1990s, said Mahmood Mamdani, a Ugandan Asian academic at Columbia University.
He added that "Custodian Board officials and several unscrupulous Asian lawyers" turned the repossession process "into an opportunity to make a huge amount of money".
The board's current executive secretary, George William Bizibu, said told the Thomson Reuters Foundation he would not comment on the report "because that's at the level of Parliament".
Among those named in the parliamentary report is an Asian businessman called Mohamed Allibhai, the same man that the Visram family gave power of attorney over their home.
The report said Allibhai had fraudulently repossessed nearly 1,000 expropriated properties "and went on to manage or even own the properties ... to the detriment of the real owners".
Allibhai did not respond to a request for comment, but his lawyer, Eddy Okumu, said some people were trying to reopen decades-old cases for selfish ends.
"The genesis of those allegations of fraud is to find a way of grabbing these properties and sell them."
In July, a judge ruled that the parliamentary committee had "exceeded its mandate" and acted "illegally" by investigating cases that had already been settled in court.
Dog-eared files are stacked on cabinets and piled on the floor at the Custodian Board offices in Kampala, the Ugandan capital.
"This is just a drop in the sea," said Bizibu, the board's head since 2017.
He said 4,063 properties had been reclaimed and another 1,500 sold by the government. More than 2,000 properties remain unclaimed.
"Everyone has a right to come and claim his or her property, even today," he said.
But 50 years after the expulsion, he said, the biggest challenges, are "impersonators", "forgeries" and "loose ends" in the archives.
More than 7,000 miles (11,300km away, in Canada, Visram is exasperated by the failure of the Ugandan government to right a historic wrong. -- Reuters