East West Link tollway stoush over Footscray market site Stall holders at the ­Melbourne Wholesale Fruit and Vegetable Market have been told they must leave their Footscray Rd base in July. A LENGTHY legal stoush threatens to leave hundreds of Melbourne wholesale market stall holders without a place to do business when East West Link construction starts. This will clear the way for the Napthine Government to demolish buildings and hand the site to the company selected to build the East West Link tollway. The land will be available to the tunnel builder from ­October, for a period of five to seven years. But final building works on a new market site in Epping have been delayed by an ongoing court case between market tenant Perfection Fresh and government agency, the Melbourne Market Authority. In an affidavit submitted to the Supreme Court, the ­Government's Epping Market project director, Viraj Perera said all market leases from stall holders had to be signed by no later than July 12, 2013, to ­ensure the market would be ready to open about August 22, 2014. Months after that deadline, litigation between tenants and the Government continues. Mr Perera said the lack of agreement "has made, and continues to make, it impossible to proceed with the next stage of getting the trading floor complex ready for ­operations." He predicted the Epping site would open in April 2015 at the earliest. The ­Government does not have an alternate venue for stall ­holders. An affidavit from Linking Melbourne Authority chief Ken Mathers said the Footscray Rd market site was "ideal for construction purposes" for the East West Link because it had direct access to CityLink and was a short distance to the project. "The use of the West Melbourne site for construction purposes would be a major commercial benefit to the state and result in substantially lower tender prices for the East West Link project than if ­another site elsewhere in the metropolitan area were used," Mr Mathers said. State Development and Business Department spokesman Paul Robinson said litigation had caused "significant delay" for the new market site.