A team of officials of the Mangalore City Corporation, which went on an inspection of shops at the City Centre mall here on Monday, found that eight shops were doing business without licence.
In another building called “Singapore City Market” on the Karnad Sadashiv Rao Road, it found seven shops functioning without licence.
The team forced all the 15 shops to close down and took away their keys asking the shopkeepers to apply for trade licence.
Srikant Rao, Joint Commissioner, Mangalore City Corporation, told The Hindu that if the traders applied for trade license along with all documents required, the civic body would issue licence to them. The keys would be returned to them after issuing licence and collecting penalty from them. They would be imposed double the amount of licence fee as penalty. If not, they would not be allowed to conduct business.
Of the shops forced to shut down at the City Centre mall included a fish spa. A woman at the spa told the officials that the spa had applied for licence. Officials asked her to produce an acknowledgement receipt within an hour. The woman failed to produce the receipt an hour later. The officials had the shop shut down and took away the key with them asking her to produce the receipt or apply for the licence.
Inside the mall, they found that a shop owner had obtained one door number and was managing two shops in one licence. The owner had one shop inside “city bazaar” in the mall and another one outside the city bazaar on the corridors of the mall selling kulfi.
Names of some of the shops closed down by the officials in the mall were Party Square, My Caffee, Digitron, DXN Daeshan Trading India Pvt. Ltd. , Pensive Infotech, and Paris Garden.
At Singapore City Market (on a separate building), the officials found that the owner of S.B. Electronics had two shops. He had not renewed the licence since 2006-07. It was closed down.
Some shops in the Singapore City Market did not have proper names. The shops forced to close down included shop no. 25, Cell Net, M. S. Variety Centre, Fantastic Mobile, and Call Me Mobile.
In both the buildings, the officials spared shop owners who were awaiting licence after applying.
They had opened their shops even before getting licence.
