DOHA: The Doha Municipality has intensified crackdown on partitioned villas across the city, says a senior official.
The municipality recently booked an Asian national who made illegal partitioning in seven villas and sublet it, disclosed Salem Hammoud Al Shafi, director of monitoring department at the municipality.
Earlier he was caught in a similar offence when he was found involved in partitioning two villas for subletting it to the tenants. He has been referred to the authorities concerned for further action.
The amended law regulating the safety of buildings was issued in 2014, enabling civic authorities to clamp down on illegally partitioned villas and apartments which have been mushrooming all over due to rising demand for housing and shortages.
The law has banned any alteration in the building without an official approval from the authorities concerned. The civic authorities of late launched a country-wide crackdown in efforts to strictly implement the law.
The law amended a previous such legislation that was enforced some 31 years ago, in 1984.
Limited-income expatriate families and individuals mostly rely on illegally partitioned houses due to skyrocketing rents of independent residential units.
In another major campaign, the municipality blacklisted 39 contracting companies and engineering consultancy firms since the beginning of this year.
The list has been circulated to all municipalities and all their transactions have been frozen until they rectify their status, said the official.
Any erring company rectifying the mistakes will be immediately removed from the blacklist.
The heath monitoring section closed down 16 food outlets this year and managed to end 90 per cent of the encroachments of public property.
He said cases of violations of the law banning single workers’ accommodations in residential areas dropped by 60 percent last year compared to the previous years.
Since the beginning of this year, 1,166 abandoned vehicles have been found and 554 were towed away. The remaining were removed with knowledge of garages and vehicle owners.
Seventy-six garages and companies were caught for ruining the general view of the city.
The municipality conducted 2,624 inspections this year and detected 157 violations.
Sixteen outlets were shut down following inspection campaigns. Twenty-two violations of the law were detected in the Corniche area on National Sport Day.
The municipality has about 250 inspectors with judicial powers divided into three sections — technical monitoring, public monitoring and health control.
The Peninsula
