The Department of Natural Resources and Environment of Ho Chi Minh City has just sent a document to the city's Department of Finance regarding the list of 22 projects expected to be submitted to the City Land Valuation Council for appraisal in the fourth quarter of 2024.
Topping the list is the Lotte Eco Smart City Complex project of Lotte Group, with an estimated revenue of VND 16,000 billion according to the valuation certificate. This project was broken ground in September 2022 by Lotte Group (Korea) as the investor. However, due to financial obligations, the project has remained dormant to date.
The second largest project is the 14.8-hectare land plot in An Phu Ward, Thu Duc City, to be paid under the BT Contract of the Long Thanh - Dau Giay Expressway Parallel Road Project of Nguyen Phuong Real Estate Joint Stock Company. The estimated revenue from this project is VND 3,500 billion according to the valuation certificate.
Included in the group of trillion-dong projects is the land plot at 230 Nguyen Trai Street, Nguyen Cu Trinh Ward, District 1 of T.N.T Trung Thuy Real Estate Company Limited. The financial obligations of this project are expected to be over 3,200 billion VND. The consulting unit is completing the certificate according to Decree 71.
In addition to the 3 projects with revenue of over a trillion, the list also includes projects with very large financial obligations, with land use tax revenue ranging from 200 billion to more than 700 billion VND.
According to calculations, if only the land valuation problem for 22 projects is resolved, Ho Chi Minh City will collect 25,483 billion VND in taxes; if all 148 projects are resolved, the tax revenue will be hundreds of thousands of billions of VND.
Up to now, after many years of petitioning to resolve difficulties, projects stuck in relation to land valuation are still "frozen". There are still many projects that have not paid land use fees for more than 20 years but are not included in this list.
Recently, according to the assessment of the leaders of the Department of Natural Resources and Environment of Ho Chi Minh City, determining land prices has encountered many difficulties and problems, mainly in records with decisions on land allocation, land lease, permission to change land use purposes according to the 1993 Land Law, the 2003 Land Law and records of land lease with annual rent payment.
The main difficulty in determining land prices lies in hiring consulting units to determine land prices when these consulting units refuse to participate, because at that time, the collection of input information to determine land prices was very limited, in some cases almost no information could be collected.
Even at a workshop on land valuation last July, the leader of the Department of Natural Resources and Environment of Ho Chi Minh City said that there was a case where a project had to search 30 times but could not hire a consulting unit. This caused the process of determining land prices to drag on for months and years and has not been resolved yet.
The shortcomings and bottlenecks in land valuation in many localities in the past will be expected to be resolved when Decree 71 regulating land prices takes effect from the date the 2024 Land Law was implemented from August 1. However, there are still concerns that Decree 71 aims to resolve the difficulties of many projects in the previous period, but the problem now lies in the valuation consulting units, inspection and approval units, and the role of local authorities in policy implementation.
Land valuation is a complex issue related to the interests of both the State and enterprises, so we need to wait for the implementation of the regulations in the coming time to clearly see the effectiveness of removing obstacles for projects.
