Designers pull out of dome stadium project

A shake-up in the construction team for Taipei's first dome stadium will not interfere with the building schedule, the team's leader, Chao Teng-hsiung (趙藤雄), said yesterday.

The team, consisting of five affiliates of Chao's Far Glory Group (遠雄企業), won the bidding in mid-May to build a dome stadium at the historical site of the Sungshan Tobacco Factory (松山菸廠) in downtown Taipei.

With the contract signing ceremony for the company that will eventually operate the stadium scheduled for next month, Ricky Liu & Associates (劉培森建築師事務所), the firm that had been appointed to do the design work, pulled out of the multibillion-dollar build-operate-transfer (BOT) project last week after a row over the allotment of shares in the company.

"We have plenty of time to look for a substitute for Ricky Liu & Associates," Chao told a press conference yesterday.

Chao is the head of a preparatory committee set up by the team members, which include Metropolitan Construction (大都市建設) and Far East Construction (遠東建設), under the umbrella of Far Glory.

Six teams of architects from the US and Japan have approached Chao's conglomerate offering to take over from Ricky Liu & Associates, he said.

The dome company is required to be set up two months after the team signs an agreement with the city government.

This means the company should be set up no later than February next year.

Chao said they plan to pick a replacement before the end of the year.

Ricky Liu, a son-in-law of Taiwanese business tycoon Wang Yung-ching (王永慶), and his associates at the firm could not be reached for comment as of press time yesterday.

The planned dome company is expected to have NT$700 million (US$20.8 million) in initial capital, according to Tsai Chung-i (蔡宗易), an assistant vice president of public relations at Far Glory.

The baseball stadium will have 40,000 seats and is scheduled to be completed in June 2008 at a cost of NT$8.6 billion.

Ricky Liu & Associates proposed that Far Glory reduce its planned holdings in the new company to make room for new partners, including Taiwan's recordable disc maker CMC Magnetics Corp (中環) and Sherwood Taipei (西華飯店), Chao said.

"This is unacceptable and will go against the requirement that the original shareholder of the company should hold a minimum share of 50 percent in the operation," Chao said.

Far Glory has suggested reducing its stake to 30 percent from the originally planned 60 percent, Chao said.