Dubai: Shoreline Apartments owners on The Palm Jumeirah are moving court against developer Nakheel for locking the access doors to the beach in their buildings, XPRESS can reveal.
Nader Alizadeh, Chairman of Interim Owners' Association (IOA) for Shoreline buildings 3 and 4, told XPRESS: "We are filing a case against Nakheel to open the back doors of seven Shoreline buildings as we believe they have been locked illegally. Both the front and back door of the buildings belong to the owners and nobody has a right to lock it."
He said back doors of beach-facing buildings 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 9 have been locked in a beach access row between the owners and Nakheel.
The dispute took a serious turn on January 21 when some owners called police to get the doors unlocked. Alizadeh said: "Although the police refused to file a report on that day, they issued a statement saying that back doors were locked…residents asked for it to be unlocked…and Nakheel refused to unlock them. We will be taking this police report and seeking the court order for the doors to be opened," he said.
Buildings 1 to 10 sit on the right side of the Palm facing the beach, while buildings 11 to 20 sit on the left.
There are 20 Shoreline buildings in Palm Jumeirah of which four buildings — 7, 8, 10 and 18 — have been bought by individuals or companies and have separate building management companies. Apartments in the remaining 16 buildings were sold by Nakheel to individuals. There are 13 IOAs managing these buildings.
Shoreline owners met on January 23 to finalise market fee costs for building management and compare them to actual costs levied by Nakheel.
"From 2007 until 2009, Nakheel did not have approval for service charges from the Real Estate Regulatory Authority (Rera). In addition, these charges were high and not acceptable to owners. Hence, we requested an audit to be done to scrutinise all charges laid down in that period and see how they compared to market rates. We have seen huge variations in the two and Rera accepted that we could bring those papers to them. Rera will ask Nakheel to set up a technical committee to resolve this matter so that budget allocations are appropriately done," said Alizadeh.
"The owners have issues and problems [but] we still love Dubai. All of us have made investments here and we want to make it work well for us," he added.
