Excelsior owners ask govt to lift ban on apartment registrations

Tussle between AP Govt and Emaar MGF left buyers in the 350-apartment property in the lurch, though their purchases were transparent

Owners Welfare Association of Excelsior, a 350-apartment joint project between the Andhra Pradesh government and Emaar MGF, is requesting the new TRS government to treat them as independent and remove the registration ban on the apartments.

The bookings for the apartments project, overlooking a championship golf course at Gachibowli in Hyderabad, started in 2008 with the promised delivery slated for June 2011.

In April 2010, the government and the developer were caught in a legal tussle. While the government claimed lost revenues and blocked all the registrations, the builder stopped construction and claimed force majeure, serial entrepreneur-turned-investor and association president Raghu Battina told mediapersons here on Thursday.

"The project seems to have slipped into a state of limbo with the owners having been left in the lurch, notwithstanding the fact that the AP High Court and the CBI inquiry have given a largely clean chit to Excelsior saying the apartments were purchased transparently with no wrong doing," he said.

Excelsior predominantly attracted professional and non-resident Indians (NRIs), including 50 from the US, who wanted to come back and make a home here, and saw Excelsior as a "return-to-India, return-to-Hyderabad opportunity". About 70 of them have paid 100 per cent of the apartment cost, Battina claimed.

"We demand that the 14-acre Excelsior that represents only 2.6 per cent of the 535-acre Emaar MGF project, be given to the rightful owners. We also request the new state government to instruct the builder to restart construction with a planned completion date," he said.