Municipal Councillors are angry at government plans to move the Manama Central Market, instead of including it in a massive new development.

The Manama Municipality's original plan was to include the market area in a BD1 billion business, residential, shopping and leisure city-within-a-city.

Designs for the project included a new BD120 million central market, to be renamed the Capital Trade Centre.

But municipality officials have told Manama Municipal councillors that the Cabinet agreed to build a central market for each governorate, at its weekly session last month.

Municipality director-general Abdulkarim Hassan said that since the government was willing to build a central market from its budget, then the municipality didn't need to spend anything.

He said the current central market location could be solely used for the investment project, while the new market could be built on municipal land near Dana Mall, Sanabis.

This angered a number of councillors, who stressed that the decision was not with the municipality, it was with them.

'The council has the right to choose between the proposals after individual studies are presented on each, and this should be done through a vote,' said council technical committee chairman Hameed Al Basri.

'The new proposal comes as a shock to us, since we have agreed in principle with the first and preliminary drawings have already been finalised.

'We can't trust the government because we know that if they take the current central market's location completely for private investment, it would be very difficult for us to monitor the new development.

'It is true that the land is municipal and not government property, but giving it away for the government to run will mean having no control over it afterwards.

'This is similar to the new BD1bn Northern Town. People were promised that the town would be dedicated to government homes, but it now seems that the place will be 90 per cent private investment and the rest for government homes.'

Al Basri said councillors had not rejected the new idea, but raised objections.

'We want to see studies, and at the moment we have none. We are still waiting for the newly-appointed consultant to come up with an investment study for the current proposal and it now seems he will have to come up with two,' he said.

The current proposed project comprises four 28-storey office and shopping towers, with the new central market planned to take up the basement and ground floors.

Floors one to six include car parking and a massive shopping mall, while the remaining 20 floors in each tower will house offices.

The main development also includes four other massive skyscrapers, housing offices and apartments, swimming pools, multi-purpose halls, gyms and other facilities.

There will also be a five-star hotel and Green Plaza heritage village and park, plus an international bus station, which will 'link Bahrain with the world' through land routes via Saudi Arabia.

The whole development will be financed entirely by private investors. The municipality will own 28pc of the Capital Trade Centre, since it owns the land. - TradeArabia News Service