The Malé City Council will hand over its biggest projects to the Ministry of Construction and Infrastructure before newly elected, opposition-aligned Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP)’s, Adam Azim is sworn in as Mayor, the council decided during a meeting on Wednesday.
According to local media sources, the Principal Secretary to the President on Corporate Development, Mohamed Shahid, was present at the meeting which approved the transfer of the projects to the Ministry of Construction and Infrastructure, for the projects to be implemented by the administration — the decision was based on a paper submitted by Shahid.
The majority administration-aligned council unanimously approved the motion to proceed as per the paper.
In his paper, Shahid, who was in charge of some of the administrative aspects of the projects before leaving the Malé City Council to take up his current portfolio, suggested that the projects be handed over to the ministry for temporary management without any change in the terms agreed by the council.
The paper submitted to the council meeting proposed for the administration, through the Ministry of Construction and Infrastructure, to take over some projects — each valued at MVR 100 million or more. Thus the council decided to transfer the projects to the administration under condition that if work does not begin within six months of handover, the projects can then be transferred back to the council.
“We are proposing based on the value of the projects, each project is typically worth over MVR 100 million if you do an evaluation. Although the council did not spend, there are a lot of technical things to look out for when implementing projects of this size,” Shahid said.
The specific projects have not been made public.