Authorities should not use the land they expropriated under the Mass Rapid Transit Act (大眾捷運法) to build housing projects, the Council of Grand Justices said on Friday in a constitutional interpretation on the scandal-plagued MeHAS City Project (美河市) on the Taipei Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) System’s Songshan-Xindian line.
“The land that authorities expropriated in accordance with Article 6 of the act for construction projects to build mass rapid transportation systems should not be used for joint development housing projects, which are governed by Article 7-1 of the act,” Judicial Yuan Secretary-General Lu Tai-lang (呂太郎) told a news conference in Taipei, quoting the interpretation.
“The Taipei City Government should not have based land expropriation on Article 6 and Article 7-1 simultaneously. If it wanted to initiate joint development projects, it should have proposed another plan, instead of pursuing commercial gains under the guise of serving the public interest,” Lu said.
The Taipei City Government in 1991 expropriated 239 plots of land in Sindian (新店) to build the Xindian Depot close to Xiaobitan MRT Station to house machinery.
In 2001, the Taipei Department of Rapid Transit Systems signed a contract with Radium Life Tech Co for construction of the depot.
Large areas remained unused after the facility was completed in 2007, and the administration of then-Taipei mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) allowed the firm to build the housing complex on the remaining land.
The landowners said that the city seized more land than it needed at prices much lower than the market value in the name of developing public transportation systems, but later used their properties to build houses for profit.
Despite claiming NT$3.5 billion (US$108 million) from Radium for the land the company undervalued after results of an arbitration was announced in July last year, the city government risks paying landowners compensation estimated at more than NT$20 billion after the council in 2015 pronounced the land expropriation unconstitutional.
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