The Lands Department is ready to pay the owner of a Tsoi Yuen Tsuen metal recycling plant compensation intended for farmers, as long as he is willing to move. And the MTR Corp, which urgently wants the land for a road, has also offered to pay the owner an extra HK$150,000.
Cheung Sun-yau, 55, has been offered about HK$220,000 for the trees, seedlings, pond, abandoned house and chicken shed on his rented 40,000 sq ft of farmland, even though it mainly houses machines and metal awaiting recycling.
The Lands Department made the offer late last year after it started resumption of land in the village for the HK$66.9 billion high-speed railway to Guangzhou, Cheung said. The MTR Corp, the government's contractor for the project, offered HK$150,000 more recently, he said.
'If I promise to move out, the MTR will pay me HK$150,000,' Cheung said. 'They previously said I was not entitled to any compensation because I did not receive permission to change a piece of farmland into a factory.'
However, the MTR Corp said last night it had not offered compensation, but to buy 'some materials like hoardings at his site at a reasonable price for our works'.
Cheung plans to reject both offers. He said they were a long way short of the amount he needed to repay the money he borrowed to build the recycling plant in late 2007, one year before the government announced it would resume the land.
