A consultant will be named this week to come up with an investment study for the BD1 billion ($2.6 billion) Central Market project.

Final preliminary drawings and miniature models for the project are now being finalised by the Manama Municipality, to allow the selected company to start work immediately.

The Central Market area will be turned into a business, residential, shopping and leisure city-within-a-city.

The feasibility study will outline a timeframe for the work and what should come first.

It will also outline how to move current merchants without their businesses being badly affected.

The study will focus on whether the development should be tendered for a single investor or a group of investors, according to their specialisations, taking into consideration what would profit the municipality most, said acting municipality director-general Zuhair Al Dallal.

He said that the Tender Board would name the project’s investment consultant next week.

’But, we still don’t know whether the firm will complete the report by the end of the year or early next year, considering that there are certain factors that the consultant has to take into account,’ said Al Dallal.

’The place is crowded most of the time and any development would mean that movement would be affected.

’So we will suggest that the consultant come up with a plan to divide the development area into different phases, with each phase being given a certain timeframe.

’We also have merchants there and unless we have an alternate location for them, we can’t move them out. The place we were planning to move them to has now been added to the massive project, so the consultant should address this problem.’

Al Dallal said that he was very pleased that the project was going to start soon.

’The Manama Municipal Council hopes that the project will be handled by a single investor, because it would help them during the monitoring process. We prefer to have a group of investors, because we believe in specialisation. We believe that consortiums would please both the council and the municipality.

The project will include a new BD120 million central market, which will be renamed the Capital Trade Centre - comprising four 28-storey office and shopping towers, with the new central market taking up the basement and ground floors.

Floors one to six will include car parking and a massive shopping mall, while the remaining 20 floors in each tower will house offices.

The main development will also include four other massive skyscrapers, housing offices and apartments, swimming pools, multi-purpose halls and gyms.

There will also be a five-star hotel and Green Plaza heritage village and park, plus an international bus station, which will ’link Bahrain with the world’ through land routes via Saudi Arabia.

The whole development will be financed entirely by private investors.

The municipality will own 28 per cent of the Capital Trade Centre, since it owns the land. - TradeArabia News Service