Citing a lack of transparency in the Puerta Guadalajara project, city hall vowed last week to revoke the right of Spanish consortium Mecano America to redevelop 13 hectares of land beside the Periferico (city beltway) and the Calzada Independencia.
With anonymous investors having bought a majority shareholding in the project, local authorities decided that the original terms of the concession had been violated.“We will initiate procedures to reverse this concession. We don’t know who the stakeholder is. This is a huge mystery,” Guadalajara Mayor Ramiro Hernandez said.
“We’ve had contact through third parties, [but] no direct communication. It appears there was a change of ownership,” he explained, suggesting the new shareholders had failed to honor a “commitment that was clearly established in the concession agreements.”
Granted in 2008 by the municipal government led by Alfonso Petersen Farah of the National Action Party (PAN), the concession stipulated that Mecano America must invest 668 million pesos in public infrastructure, building a museum, a school, a conference center and Red Cross facilities, and rehabilitating the existing planetarium.
The developers were due to spend an additional six billion pesos on private development, constructing a four-star hotel, office blocks, a shopping mall and 18 towers with 1,872 apartments. The project was meant to create 10,000 direct jobs and another 20,000 indirect jobs.