Metro

Hong Kong textile king, trash magnate spar over remodel

It’s the Hong Kong textile king versus the New York City waste-hauling magnate in a legal battle over renovations to a $7.3 million landmarked town house on the Upper East Side.

Chinese fashion exec Alfred K.T. Chan and his business-partner wife, Fiona Madeline Cibani, claim their next-door neighbor Susan Frank Stamell — heir to her family’s waste-hauling business — is refusing to give them access to their property at 118 E. 78th St. to install scaffolding for a gut renovation of their neo-Georgian home.

Chan, who owns an empire of high-end department stores, says he already has received approvals from the city and the Landmarks Preservation Commission to complete the work.

The five-story limestone building — built in the 1860s — had been chopped up into 11 apartments when Chan and Cibani bought the property in 2010.

They want to restore it to a town house by adding brick garden walls, skylights, a rooftop terrace and decorative ironwork, according to court papers.

But Stamell — who served as New York ports commissioner under Mayor Ed Koch in the 1980s — and her lawyer husband, Jared, are making a stink over quality-of-life issues surrounding the project.

“What happens in this type of situation is you’re imposing a lot of burden on the neighbors,” said Jared.

“Imagine if someone is pounding on your walls and causing dust at your house and that goes on all day long.”

In a December 2013 ­e-mail, Jared Stamell demanded a halt to the construction, claiming it posed a fire hazard and a potential structural hazard. He wants his neighbors to pay for an independent engineer to certify the project.

The Stamell town house is located at 116 E. 78th St., one door from the Chan-Cibani place

The block is part of the Upper East Side Historic District.

Susan Stamell is no stranger to legal battles — she was convicted on fraud charges in 1996 for allowing her family’s barges to dump pollution in New York Harbor when the sludge was supposed to be shipped out to sea.

She was sentenced to four months in jail in 1996, but was allowed to spend the time at her luxury home off Park Avenue to care for her young children.

The fashion moguls are also suing their neighbor to the west — real-estate investor Jacques Blinbaum.

Blinbaum had griped in a January 2014 letter to his neighbors’ attorney that the scaffolding ruins the view of the sky from his yard and could give intruders easy access to his home.

Chan and Cibani want the court to grant them access to the property.