Macau Urban Renewal Limited, a newly-established company fully owned by the government, announced yesterday that Pearl Horizon pre-sale buyers who want to buy a unit in its “home swap” housing project to be built on the plot where the ill-fated residential project is located will have to file their applications from June 17 to August 16, and those who fail to apply during the period will be disqualified from buying one.
The company, which is tasked with the city’s urban renewal process, convened a press conference yesterday to brief the media about details on the application process for the purchase of the “home swap” units and on the upcoming development of the project on the plot in Areia Preta district, officially known as plot “P”.
The ill-fated Pearl Horizon residential project has been mothballed since December 2015 when its provisional land concession expired. The government then announced the annulment of the site’s provisional land concession in January 2016. The project’s developer – Polytex – then sued the government over the land concession’s cancellation. Since then, dozens of disgruntled pre-sale buyers have held a string of protest rallies and repeatedly petitioned the government over their plight.
The Land Law, which came into force in March 2014, stipulates that provisional land concessions cannot be renewed upon their expiration if their leaseholders fail to finish developing the respective plots of land within a maximum concession period of 25 years.
Top court ruling
Based on a ruling by the Court of Final Appeal (TUI) in May last year which turned down the project developer’s appeal against the government’s cancellation of the site’s provisional land concession, the government first announced its proposed solution to the long-running Pearl Horizon row during a press conference at that time, in which it said that it would repossess the plot where the abandoned Pearl Horizon project is located and that it planned to develop a “home swap” housing project on the site with some of the project’s units to be set aside for Pearl Horizon pre-sale buyers to purchase.
Peter Kam Kam Seng (second from right), who heads Macau Urban Renewal Limited, addresses yesterday’s press conference at the Government Service Centre in Areia Preta about the company’s “home swap” project to be built on the Pearl Horizon plot, as Paulo Tse (first from right), the first vice-president of the company’s board of directors, Zhao Yuan (second from left), a senior public servant at the Secretariat for Administration and Justice (GSAJ), and Ho Cheng Wa, who heads the Integrated Services and Quality Supervision Department of the Municipal Affairs Bureau (IAM), look on. Courtesy: TDM
