Huge amounts at risk in Amazon project

Developers of tech giant Amazon’s office park in Observatory in Cape Town could stand to lose over R120m if the project is stopped, with more than 5,000 construction jobs lost, creating a situation that would be “catastrophic” to all involved. The private development is being opposed by the Goringhaicona Khoi Khoin indigenous council, which wants the high court to halt construction.

Developers of tech giant Amazon’s office park in Observatory in Cape Town could stand to lose more than R120m if the project is stopped, with more than 5,000 construction jobs lost, creating a situation that would be “catastrophic” to all involved.

The R4.6bn building project is turning a disused private golf course into an office park with a public park and housing and has R38m earmarked for turning polluted canals of the Liesbeek and Black rivers into rivers.

The private development is being opposed by the Goringhaicona Khoi Khoin indigenous council run by three leaders and the Observatory Civic Association led by public health expert Prof Leslie London. They want the high court in Cape Town to urgently halt construction.

The respondents are the developers, the City of Cape Town, the Western Cape government and other indigenous people.

Adv Sean Rosenberg, acting for developers Liesbeek Leisure Properties Trust, said an interdict would result in delays and such high costs that it is likely the project will not go ahead, which would be “catastrophic”.

Rosenberg warned that tech giant and data storage firm Amazon is legally permitted to stop the project if construction, already six months behind, is delayed again. Court papers estimate that by the end of September, the project had cost R349m.

A termination would, said the court papers, trigger banking fees of more than R12m, penalties of more than R22m and more than R100m owed to Amazon for breach of contract.

However, Rosenberg said, these costs “pale in comparison, actually, with the public interest component and the potential public interest loss” to the people of Cape Town. Without the development, the canalised river would not be restored, the land not be turned into a public park and none of the infrastructure projects, which include two road upgrades and a bridge construction for the City of Cape Town, would be completed.

The indigenous council has argued that the planned 10storey buildings to be built on the private golf course would harm them by damaging the “intangible aspects” of the property, which has cultural and spiritual significance for them.

The legal case concerns the heritage impact assessment being conducted as specified in law and whether an “intangible heritage impact assessment practitioner” should have been appointed to assess the project. In court papers, the developers say the heritage impact assessment found the land had no specific heritage monuments or relics and “nothing specific or important happened precisely on the exact site”.

In contrast, the Goringhaicona say the land is sacred to the Khoi and San, described in court as the “First Nations Peoples”. This stretch of land they believe to be the area where the Khoi witnessed the arrival of the first European settlers.

Usually in property development, those opposing the findings of a heritage report would produce a counterreport by other experts, but the indigenous grouping and the Observatory residents have not done so.

One difficulty the heritage experts faced was how to culturally restore the land that has no relics and has been developed for more than 100 years, the court papers say.

Heritage impact assessors concluded that the river was the most meaningful part of the area and that the project allocates R38m to fix the canals. Indigenous people will be part of the cultural centre and trail.

Moreover, the development takes up only 5% of the River Park land where the Black and Liesbeek rivers meet and are said by the opponents to have spiritual significance.

Rosenberg asked why it took the indigenous group more than 160 days to ask for a review of the environmental authorisation process and why it waited for construction to start before trying to interdict it. Its case was not urgent, he argued.

The case continues.