The half-built premises are being used as sleeping quarters by people making unauthorised use of municipal electricity.

Councillors also agreed at Wednesday's monthly City Council meeting to heed a request by the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) to provide it with all relevant documents for investigation.

A meeting with the majority bond holder, a local bank, will be held soon "to find a suitable solution".

Exactly a year ago, The Namibian reported that the Roads Contractor Company (RCC) was taking legal action against the company in charge of the deeply troubled B1 City shopping mall development in a bid to recover some N$5,7 million the parastatal had lent to the stalled project.

Erf 10485 should by now have had a flourishing shopping centre and a taxi and bus rank on the 2,26-hectare plot, and a petrol station by 2010.

Ae //Gams Engineering bought the plot in 2005 by way of a tender from the Windhoek municipality for N$3,9 million, and the RCC became a partner as project manager and civil works contractor.

The construction of the taxi rank was to cost N$600 000 and a market area another N$600 000.

Added to the purchase price, this brought the total cost to N$5,69 million.

Bank Windhoek issued a letter of undertaking to issue a bond for that amount.

However, Ae//Gams Engineering, which signed the deed of sale with the municipality, did not pay the purchase price, but the RCC did, according to documents in the City Council agenda.

The RCC paid not only the N$3,9 million, but N$585 810 value-added tax (VAT) plus interest of N$320 991 for the period April to October 2005, because Ae//Gams Engineering did not pay when signing the sales agreement in April 2005.

The RCC also paid N$3 209 as deposit for municipal services.

The Windhoek municipality can repossess a plot if the buyer has defaulted and broken the contract.

In this case, the breach entails that the buyer (RCC) did not complete the first phase of the development within two years dated from 2005.

It did not even approach the City to ask for an extension of the deadline.

A year ago, the RCC asked the Windhoek High Court to direct Ae //Gams Engineering to pay the N$5,691 million to the RCC, plus interest of 11 per cent a year on that amount.

The parastatal also had a summons served on Ae //Gams Engineering to inform the company that it would ask the court to order the sale of Erf 10485 in Katutura, Windhoek, to raise money to be paid to the RCC.

The matter is still in the hands of the court.

In the meantime a company, New Era Investments, has leased the plot.

The Chief Executive Officer of the Windhoek municipality, Niilo Taapopi, informed councillors on Wednesday night that workers of New Era Investments were living on the half-built premises "under deplorable hygienic conditions".

"That company pays for electricity but illegal connections have been done by others when we visited the premises and we approached the company on that issue," Taapopi told councillors, but would not reveal more.

He recommended that municipal officials should visit the site again and send a report to the Management Committee, headed by Councillor Elaine Trepper.

Although the premises are only a stone's throw away from the headquarters of the National Union of Namibian Workers (NUNW), the union has not yet bothered to address the plight of the workers living there in deplorable conditions.

By November 2006, it was reported that the RCC had already spent some N$14 million on the B1 City development, which was estimated to ultimately cost some N$54 million, while no bond had yet been registered over the property in the parastatal's name.

A mortgage bond was finally registered on December 13 2006.

In an affidavit filed last year, David Imbili, a director of Ae//Gams, indicated that a legal loophole had been found in the supposed bond that was registered over the property.

According to Imbili, the document filed with the Deeds Office as a mortgage bond was not a bond and had not been validly registered.

According to the loan agreement between RCC and Ae //Gams, the money had to be repaid in 120 consecutive monthly instalments, with the first payment due only when all building works on Erf 10485 had been completed, according to the 2007 court papers.

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