Director Board meeting of Kochi Smartcity tomorrow in Kochi

The Smart City Board of Directors meeting will take place tomorrow at Kochi. Smart City CEO Fareed Abdul Rahman and the newly appointed IT Secretary K Suresh Kumar will take part in the meeting.

This was the first meeting after Yousaf Ali had been appointed as the mediator by the State Government to hold talks with TECOM on the Smart City project.

Smart City Kochi:Board of directors meeting on March 29 will decide the Fate of the project

The fate of the proposed Rs.1,500 crore IT park in Kochi to be built by Dubai-based developer Smart City Dubai will be decided at a board of directors meeting later this month. The Kerala government is adamant that no freehold rights over the project would be given to the builder as such a clause does not exist in the original agreement between the two parties.

The meeting will take place in Kochi on March 29. 'This meeting is not an unscheduled one; instead this date was fixed at the last board meeting held last year. But the meeting is a crucial in light of the recent developments,' said a Smart City Dubai official, who did not wish to be identified.

Smart City Dubai had signed an agreement in 2007 to build a mega IT project on a 246 acre plot in Kochi, providing about 90,000 jobs. It has been demanding 12 percent freehold rights in the project area. Chief Minister V.S. Achuthanandan Wednesday said there is no freehold demand in the agreement. The developer had been told this could not be met.

Smartcity Kochi is Reviving: Top officials to attend director board meet at Kovalam

Reviving the proposed SmartCity Kochi project that has been in a limbo for sometime now, a meeting of the board of directors of the company has been scheduled at Kovalam on Wednesday at 6.30 p.m.

SmartCity Kochi chief executive officer Fareed Abdulrahman; vice-chairman Rashid Lathif Almullah; and business development manager Mithun Beeru are expected to attend the meeting. This is the sixth director board meeting of SmartCity Kochi, of which Fisheries Minister S. Sarma is the chairman.

The meeting assumes significance amidst reports that the State government was considering a replacement for SmartCity in the project. Also the time fixed by SmartCity, and reiterated many times by Abdulrahman, to see some progress in the project was set to expire this month.

After the last meeting of the board of directors and the subsequent Chief Secretary-level talks in September failed to reach a consensus on a host of contentious issues, the State government kept on repeating that it was working on ways to schedule further talks with the Dubai-based promoters of the project to remove the hurdles hindering the progress of the project.

Source