The Phnom Penh municipal government will be moving its public works and transportation department out of its offices near Olympic Stadium by the end of the month and into a new facility built by the Khun Sea Development Group as part of a land swap deal, a city official and the firm’s owner said Monday.
City Hall spokesman Long Dimanche said the new offices in Russei Keo district’s Chroy Changva peninsula would also be home to the municipality’s motorcycle registration office and its units in charge of drainage and sewage, roads and bridges, public lights and gardens.
“We will move to the new office sometime this month,” Mr. Dimanche said. “At the new location the company is constructing a total of seven buildings in accordance with Phnom Penh’s design plan.”
Khun Sea, the owner of the Khun Sea Development Group, said the new facilities were nearly ready.
“The construction at the new site is completely done,” Mr. Sea said. He said the city had also asked him recently to add three parking lots to serve the new offices.
“I got the swap deal from the Phnom Penh municipality around three years ago. At the time there were a few companies who applied, but I was chosen since I offered a higher price than other firms,” he said.
Mr. Sea declined to say how much it was costing him to acquire the 2,000 square meters of prime real estate near Olympic Stadium, where he planned to build condominiums and residential housing.
In October, the Information Ministry said it was swapping an 11-hectare plot of land in Phnom Penh’s Meanchey district, the former site of National Radio AM 918, with Khun Sea’s firm in return for a new radio tower in Kandal province.
Earlier this month, three families filed a complaint with the Phnom Penh Municipal Court accusing Mr. Sea of waging an ongoing campaign of intimidation to force them out of their homes in Tuol Kok district. The families said a bag of poisonous cobra snakes had recently been thrown through one of their windows.
