Owners of shop units in the Ampang Park shopping complex are once again appealing to the government not to tear down the building to make way for a station in the Klang Valley Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) line, reported The Star.
Led by Mohd Ridzuan Abdullah, the President of the Small and Medium Scale Entrepreneurs Association of Malaysia (Ikhlas), the shop owners held a protest on Thursday (6 April) to air their sentiment. He said they are not protesting for better compensation but to save their livelihood and freehold titles.
One strata owner David Ting revealed that he had spent his entire life savings to buy a shop unit at the shopping complex. He even fought an eight-year legal tussle to get his title.
“We don’t want the building to be broken down because we have seen from the plan, the required construction area will only take up a small part of the ground floor,” said Datuk Nik Md Salleh Nik Jaffar, Vice Chairman of Ampang Jaya Traders Committee.
He believes it’s illogical for the government to demolish the whole Ampang Park shopping complex when only a small portion of the building needs to be demolished. As such, Nik Md suggests shutting down the mall temporarily and reopen it after the MRT construction has been completed.
But back in 2015 when this was first brought up, MRT Corp said they need to demolish the entire shopping centre, even though the building of the station would only involve two-thirds of the mall’s subterranean area.
This is because workers will dig 44 metres below the site and this is expected to destabilise the structure, explained MRT Corp’s Commercial and Land Management Director, Datuk Haris Fadzilah Hassan.
In a last ditch effort to save their shops, the businessmen submitted a letter of appeal to Datuk Tengku Adnan Tengku Mansor, the Federal Territories Minister. In the document, they offered suggestions that would enable the construction of the MRT line to proceed, without the need to tear down the entire Ampang Park shopping complex.
Among other developments in Ampang are:
1. M,City
2. The Astoria
Image sourced from The Star
Radin Ghazali, Content Writer at PropertyGuru, edited this story. To contact her about this or other stories email radin@propertyguru.com.my
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