SL signs MoU with Singapore’s Surbana to develop Beira lakefront

„„By Chandeepa Wettasinghe S u r b a n a J u r o n g Private Limited (SJ), an infrastructure and urban development subsidiary of Singapore’s state-owned investment vehicle Temasek Holdings, will be partnering with Sri Lanka’s Board of Investment (BOI) to develop the Beira lakefront in the future, a leading government official said. “There’s so much frontage to the lake. The Beira Lake will be redeveloped. It will be drenched, then purified.

All nearby lands will be under the focus of the new project, which has been envisaged and taken forward and offered to investors,” BOI Chairman Upul Jayasuriya said this week. Speaking at the Asia Hotel & Tourism Investment Conference, he said that the BOI and SJ have entered into a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to create a joint venture company with 60-40 equity, respectively. “(With) the MoU we have entered with Surbana Singapore, they (SJ) will not only be developing and making proposals with the help of our local professionals (but) their own expertise,” Jayasuriya added.

He said that improving the Beira lakefront is important because it is the centre of the city, which no one can avoid. “If you go around the city of Colombo, from whichever side you try to approach, you see the Beira Lake. It’s fairly large. It’s all over the place,” he said. Redeveloping the Beira lakefront is part of the Megapolis Project—a brainchild of Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe—for which the blueprints were created and finalized by Singapore’s Housing Development Board subsidiary CESMA International Pte Ltd in 2004 while Wickremesinghe was previously in power. Under the landmark project, the Beira lakefront is expected to become one of the country’s main tourism zones focusing on lifestyle and entertainment and the government is hoping to offer investors approximately 229 acres of state-owned land around the lakeshore for development.

Finance Minister Ravi Karunanayake, also speaking at the tourism conference, said that the government would facilitate for Colombo to become a shopping destination whose popularity will surpass Bangkok, Thailand.