The blogger says that in trying to “reveal” the “actual low costs” of certain segments of the infrastructure project – namely, the 110km of multiple bridges and 50km of multiple tunnels – SR shows that the per kilometre (per km) cost would be up to five times less than the cost of similar projects in Selangor and Penang, under the Pakatan Harapan coalition governments.
“There are 50km of multiple tunnels across the Titiwangsa mountain range for the ECRL. Sarawak Report gives the total cost to be RM4.6 billion – meaning just RM92 million per km.
“Whereas DAP Penang’s Tunnel project costs RM3.6 billion for 7.2km. That works out to RM500 million per km,” Lim said casting doubt on either extreme, that is the actual cost of the tunnel segment in the ECRL project is intentionally undervalued by SR or the Penang government are putting a price that is way above the actual cost for their tunnel.
Either way, Lim says, SR have only made their “exposed” document look even more “dodgy”.
“Sarawak Report also said the ECRL project construction cost for multiple bridges totaling 110km of length is RM6.374 billion or just RM58 million per km.
“By comparison, the Selangor government-funded, and much delayed, third Klang bridge is said to cost RM230 million for 1.2km – or RM191 million per km.
“Even the recently opened semi-rural Batang Sadong bridge in Sarawak cost RM231 million for 1.48km or RM156 million per km, while the planned Batang Lupar bridge, of 5km is estimated to cost RM800 million – RM160 million per km,” Lim said.
With these bridges, both built and in the planning stages, said to cost so high, Lim contented that SR had “deliberately created figures that are twice or three times lower than real-world figures in order to give the misleading perception that at least half of the ECRL project cost is ‘songlap’ and diverted to 1MDB.”
Last July, Lim had in a blog post, written about accusations from SR on the same ECRL project and poked holes in its report about the inflated costs of the project.
Highlighting the errors in its initial report linking ECRL to a “1MDB bailout”, the blogger took SR to task for not even getting the total cost correct.
Lim had said there were multiple problems with SR’s “exposé”, including the fact that the projected cost of the ECRL was already RM60 billion and not RM30 billion as alleged.
Then too, the SR allegation that the price tag for a rail line and overall infrastructure development cost spanning the width of the peninsula showed it would cost far less than the Penang undersea tunnel project – that is between RM96.7 million per km (ECRL) and RM555 million per km (Penang tunnel).
Lim’s latest post was in response to SR’s story, published last Saturday, in which it claimed that it had discovered a secret bail out plan for 1MDB, using the ECRL project.
“Internal documents acquired by this site provided a breakdown of the entire cost of the project negotiated with the Chinese state company CCCC.
“The information showed that the construction company, together with the Malaysian finance ministry had deceitfully agreed to inflate the cost of the entire project by over 100%, in order to hide the repayment of US$5.63 billion of 1MDB debt,” the article said.