Greed that puts lives in danger
Every time you tell yourself our property developers can surely sink no lower with their greed, something else happens to make you shake your head in disgust.
But the sickening story of The Icon luxury development in Mid-Levels is not just about greed. It is about greed so extreme that it involves abuse of fire-safety rules. When fire-safety rules are abused, people could end up dead. That's what we're talking about with The Icon, not just buyers being given what they have described as 'rubbish dump' flats. It is lunacy that flats with living space of barely 400 square feet cost HK$10 million.
Greed on the part of developers, buyers and speculators, combined with a government too gutless to confront the property tycoons, created that lunacy. Would The Icon event have happened if the government had dared to impose tougher rules on home sales instead of allowing the developers to police themselves?
This outrage involves a possible conspiracy between developer Winfoong International and some buyers to flout fire rules by converting closed kitchens into open ones without government approval. Why buyers would agree to put their own lives at risk this way is something Public Eye has no answer to. But greed knows no boundaries.
The sickening story unfolded when some buyers couldn't believe they had been handed unfinished flats that looked like construction sites. A normal government would have been so rattled by the public fury over developers behaving this way that it would have moved swiftly with tough new rules. But ours is not a normal government. It is a kowtowing one. Developers do what they do because they know they can get away with it. And the record shows they have.
It's official - our flat prices are insane