The act of illegally appropriating the apartment maintenance fund of the investor constitutes a crime.

Questioning session at the 7th session of the 14th National Assembly. Photo: VNA

Questioning Minister Pham Hong Ha, delegate Luu Van Duc (Dak Lak delegation)In reality, some investors, with poor financial and professional capacity, are still approved to be investors in apartment buildings. Therefore, when assigned to manage the maintenance fund, they often delay, do not hand it over to the management board but appropriate it and use it for other purposes.

There are also many apartment buildings where investors change the design, cut utilities, increase the number of apartments, and hand over poor quality, leading to delays in handing over construction documents to the management board and disagreements on common and private areas, making it difficult to determine maintenance costs....

“That is one of the reasons leading to many disputes, complications, and frustrations in apartment buildings today. I request the Minister to inform us of the responsibility for state management and the Minister's viewpoint on handling the above violations,” the delegate questioned.

Delegate Nguyen Mai Bo questioned Minister Pham Hong Ha.

Delegate Nguyen Mai Bo (An Giang delegation) also raised the issue that, according to Article 176 of the Housing Law, construction inspectors are responsible for inspecting housing management, and the Ministry of Construction is responsible for directing and organizing specialized inspections of housing.

The delegate raised the issue that the construction inspection agency had inspected and discovered to do the following two things: Request to re-sign the contract for buying and selling the apartment building because this contract was originally invalidated because the common use area originally belonged to the residents but is now occupied by the investor.

The second thing to do is to transfer the case to the criminal investigation agency to handle the crime of abusing the apartment building maintenance fund credit.

Responding to delegates, Minister Pham Hong Ha said that one of the causes of disputes in apartment building management is that some investors with poor capacity deliberately delay handing over the apartment building maintenance fund to make illegal profits, delay in submitting documents, delay in handing over documents, maintenance fund, not fulfilling their warranty obligations, etc.

“These are real phenomena. In the coming time, the solution to control right from the stage when we assign bidding or assigning contracts to investors is to control the capacity of investors according to regulations,” said Mr. Pham Hong Ha.

Minister of Construction Pham Hong Ha answered questions at the Hall.

According to the Law on Real Estate Business, the capacity of investors participating in real estate construction has been fully regulated, so the head of the construction industry suggested that localities in the process of implementing this must have better control to ensure the capacity of investors when participating in the construction of real estate projects.

Minister Pham Hong Ha also said that in 2018 and the first 6 months of 2019, the Inspectorate of the Department of Construction of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City inspected 92 apartment projects and imposed administrative fines of VND 5.5 billion, requiring remedial measures for 20 investors for arbitrarily changing the function and purpose of using common ownership.

Also through inspections in the two major cities above, administrative violations were fined 1.3 billion VND, requiring remedial measures to be applied to 11 investors who did not hand over, were late in handing over, or did not fully hand over the apartment maintenance fund to the management board. Currently, the localities have not transferred any cases to the investigation agency.

Not agreeing with the above answer, delegate Nguyen Mai Bo raised a debate sign and emphasized that the act of appropriating the apartment maintenance fund constitutes a crime in the Penal Code. The fact that the inspectors did not detect it was due to weak capacity or failure to fulfill their responsibilities.

"If the construction inspectors cannot detect it, we can invite at least 3 delegates to raise this issue to join the inspection team, and we will clarify it" - Mr. Nguyen Mai Bo said and asked the Minister to reconsider this issue "to protect the poor".

"People who embezzled 5 million VND were criminally prosecuted, but here, embezzling a billion VND is not punished?" - Mr. Nguyen Mai Bo wondered.

Regarding this issue, in the question and answer session and clarifying some issues of concern to delegates, Deputy Prime Minister Trinh Dinh Dung requested the Ministry of Construction to coordinate with the Ministry of Public Security and localities, especially Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City - where there are many apartment projects - to strictly implement Directive 29 of the Government on strengthening State management of the management and operation of apartment buildings.

"Strictly handle violations according to regulations, especially violations of the maintenance fund to protect residents' interests" - the Deputy Prime Minister emphasized.

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