Gerakan VP Dominic Lau questions Penang government for not penalising project partner despite multiple delays in producing reports and construction start date.
PETALING JAYA: Gerakan has laid any blame for the delays in the state’s undersea tunnel project on the state government.
Gerakan vice-president Dominic Lau said the full feasibility studies and detailed design (FSDD) reports for the tunnel and three main roads on the island were supposed to be completed by April 2016.
“You missed the deadline and in October 2017, the special purpose vehicle (SPV) said there is no more urgency to complete the reports,” he said in a statement today.
“Based on the original timeline, the first phase of the project was supposed to start construction in the first quarter of 2015 and completed by this year. As of now, this first phase has not even started construction.”
He added that Mudajaya Bhd, the company awarded the construction of the second phase in December 2016, decided to terminate it less than a year later.
He said it had cited uncertainties in securing the exact date for the site possession and in signing the construction contract, as well as insufficient information provided for the project, causing lapse in the timelines in accordance with the award letter.
“Is BN responsible for those uncertainties used as a reason for the listed company to decline a RM810 million construction award?” Lau said.
Yesterday, Penang Chief Minister Lim Guan Eng said that he did not know if the projects would go on as there was clear sabotage by the BN federal government.
Citing arrests made by the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC), he said: “People want contracts (given) to build roads. No one expects that after building roads, they will end up in prison.”
Earlier this week, MACC reportedly arrested the chairman of an engineering consultancy firm with the title “Datuk Seri” and an engineering consultant in a Kuala Lumpur-based company to assist in investigations into alleged corruption in the tunnel project.
On Jan 19, two individuals with the title “Datuk”, who were remanded for six days to facilitate investigations into the same case, were released on bail.
Lau also said the state did not appear to penalise the SPV, Consortium Zenith Construction Sdn Bhd, despite the multiple delays in the reports and the construction start date.
He said despite important changes in the financial and technical strength of the project, as promised when it was awarded, the state did not seem to want to cancel it.
“As of today, almost five years after the contract was awarded, the SPV still only has paid-up capital of RM26.5 million. That is way below the RM381 million minimum paid-up capital required by the Penang state government to deliver the project,” he said.
Lau added that BN politicians were not the beneficiaries of any alleged kickbacks into the project.
“Those arrested and remanded so far are not BN politicians and BN certainly didn’t point a gun at your heads to force you to agree to pay a staggering RM305 million in consultancy fees to do the FSDD reports.
“That is 400% higher than the Board of Engineers’ allowable guidelines,” he said.
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