KOHAT, Nov 23: The local businessmen, who had paid in advance for purchasing shops in a commercial plaza, have asked the tehsil municipal administration to either complete the project without further delay or refund the deposited amounts with interest.
It was learnt from officials and businessmen that the commercial plaza, which is being constructed on the site of the old jail building in the city, was lying incomplete despite the start of work in 2010.
As a result of delay in the completion of the commercial plaza, the majority of shopkeepers have refused to open shops in the constructed portion of the building.
The work on the Kotal plaza was to be completed in one year in 2011 but the contractor who took over its construction on build, operate and transfer basis, demanded one extra year for completing the work.
Dawn learnt that the TMA and the contractor had promised to construct 240 shops in the three-storey building spread over 890 kanals of land, 160 offices, a grand mosque provide water, electricity, latrines facilities and fix marble on floors and stairs.
But the contractor took money from the shopkeepers through middlemen and fled to Punjab leaving the work incomplete.
The middlemen sold shops to businessmen at exorbitant rates, charging Rs2 million instead of Rs400,000 for each shop.
It has been observed that hundreds of hand carts have come up on the open space of the under construction structure, complained a businessman, Rasheed, who has paid for three shops in the building.
The TMA has also suffered a loss of Rs6 million because nobody is now ready to buy shops in the incomplete plaza. The business community said they had paid exorbitant prices for shops on the first and above floors.
The TMA was to earn a profit Rs500 million from the plaza after its completion but the project has flopped. The TMA had also constituted an inquiry comprising tehsil municipal officer, tehsil infrastructure officer and tehsil officer revenue to fix the responsibility of delay in completion of work, and to sell the large number of remaining shops. But it also failed to make the contractor to complete the work, regretted another businessmen, Khalid, who has also made huge investment in the commercial plaza.
The aggrieved traders have appealed to the chief justice of the Supreme Court to take suo motu notice of the matter so that all promised facilities were provided to them.