What next for the Capitol project?

AFTER the Court of Appeal two weeks ago threw out Perennial Real Estate Holdings' application to wind up its joint entities with Capitol Singapore co-deve-loper Pontiac Land, both sides have been left with two options - neither of them easy.

The winding-up application, if it had been successful, would have allowed a buyer to swoop in and take the entire development - its retail mall, residential development, hotel and the refurbished theatre - off the hands of the two developers.

With that option now struck off, what is left is for one party to sell its stake to the other. This is challenging because the question of "who should sell to whom" could unravel into another dispute.

According to the April 2017 court judgement, Perennial had made it clear in oral submissions that it did not wish to sell its stake, but wanted to buy Chesham's instead. (Chesham is a Pontiac affiliate company that owns half of the Capitol development.) That was the reason that it had hoped for a court-ordered buy-out instead of exercising the exit mechanism to offer to sell its shares to Chesh…