HN to name and shame cowboy builders

A violated contruction in Trương Định Street, Hà Nội. The city People’s Committee has recently ordered agencies to name and shame residential building projects that violate land regulations in the city.-Photo vov.vn

The committee also asked agencies to bar investors of the violating projects from participating in other projects.

The move came after the city’s inter-sectoral inspection team conducted random checks on 50 real-estate projects and discovered 38 projects violating regulations on planning and construction, reported Voice of Việt Nam online newspaper.

The main violations included constructing beyond permitted storeys, constructing beyond allowed areas and failing to finish legal documents for the planning and construction of the projects, the committee said.

Nguyễn Vinh Quang, head of the construction inspection team of Hai Bà Trưng District said the Trương Định Complex in Trương Định Street was one of the violating projects.

The project’s investor was found to be ignoring their commitments under the construction licence, Vinh said.

Quang said he welcomed the move by the city administration, though it was late in the day. “It’s an imperative thing to do,” he said.

When naming violating projects via mass media, locals living near the projects should help managerial agencies supervise them, he said.

With public pressure, investors would be prevented from delaying fixing their violations, he said.

The move also means that the responsibility of managerial agencies for violating cases must be clarified, he said.

In previous years, projects to construct residential buildings in the city that had bad debts or failed to meet standards on fire prevention were named via mass media.

However, it stopped at broadcasting the violated projects and did not mention the punishments that violators received after that, Trần Ngọc Quang, general secretary of the Việt Nam Real Estate Association said.

Thus, Quang said broadcasting the punishments was also necessary, he said.

He added the city administration should name violating projects more frequently and make a mechanism so that residents could access information on these projects.

Nguyễn Mạnh Hà, former head of the Ministry of Construction’s Housing and Property Market Management Department welcomed the move and said violations should be strictly punished.

Hà also stressed that the most needed thing the city had to do was not allow violating investors to participate in other projects.