NEW YORK
The developers planning to build a $100 million Islamic center near the World Trade Center site still have financial hurdles to clear: They haven't finished buying all the property they want for the project and are nearly a quarter-million dollars behind on real-estate taxes and late fees.
How serious those problems might be depends on who is backing the project -- and that's still a big unknown.
The real-estate partnership that controls the site of the planned cultural center, health club and mosque insists it has the financial wherewithal to put the project together, and that its failure to pay its first two quarterly property-tax payments this year is not evidence of fiscal ill health.
The entity that owns the building, 45 Park Place Partners LLC, has an interest-fattened $236,327 tax bill looming on Oct. 1, according to city records.
The Manhattan real-estate company that put together the building purchase, Soho Properties, issued a statement through a spokesman that waved off concerns over the missed payments and said it's not in financial distress.
The lack of payment resulted from an ongoing dispute with the city over the assessed value of the building, the company said. In such disputes, it is not unusual for building owners to temporarily suspend payments, the company said.
"This matter will be resolved shortly," the statement said.
An Associated Press review of city tax and property databases found that hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes due on other buildings controlled by Soho Properties and its managing partner, Sharif El-Gamal, have been paid on time this year, although in a few instances the payments were slightly less than the total owed.
El-Gamal, a Brooklyn-born Manhattan real-estate investor, has put together a modest real-estate portfolio over the past four years, and leads the investment group that bought the site of the planned Islamic center last summer for $4.5 million. He has declined to identify other investors in the project, saying only that the group includes Christians, Muslims and Jews.
Soho Properties says it owns or manages about $200 million worth of real estate in Manhattan.
Its holdings include a commercial building in midtown Manhattan, luxury condominiums, and a few well-worn apartment buildings with a long history of housing-code violations, many of which predated the company's purchase of the properties but have either worsened or have yet to be corrected.
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