Consortium Zenith Construction Sdn Bhd (Zenith) chairman Zarul Ahmad Mohd Zulkifli said the presentation included a breakdown of the fee structure, showing the exact fees paid to consultants which Barisan Nasional (BN) claims were too high.
“Wouldn’t it be odd that we went to the ministry to talk about the delay of feasibility studies of the undersea tunnel without discussing the fees alleged to be excessive?
“I’ve checked with my consultants who attended the presentation and they affirmed that the meeting had discussed the allegedly high fees.
“It was not an attempt by us to use the names of the ministry and the works minister to defend the allegation of high fees,” he said in a statement today.
Zarul was responding to Works Minister Fadillah Yusof, who yesterday ticked off Zenith for using the ministry and his name to defend the company against allegations of overpaying consultants of the project.
Zarul had said Zenith and Penang government officials had met top officials of the ministry, including Fadillah himself, to give a “full-fledged” explanation.
BN’s strategic communications director Abdul Rahman Dahlan first raised the overpayment issue, saying the Penang government, as the owner of the project, had paid RM177.5 million to the consultants.
He said the amount was four times the normal fees. Rahman, who is also a minister in the Prime Minister’s Department, said detailed design costs should “only be slightly over RM41 million”, according to guidelines set by the Board of Engineers (BEM), a statutory body administered by the ministry.
Zarul said Rahman’s figure of RM177.5 million for just three major roads would certainly look bloated.
But he said Rahman’s calculations left out the undersea tunnel component, which was awarded together with the three major roads under the project.
Zarul also said the RM41 million estimate calculated by BEM only took into account the civil and structural work.
He said some of the work required foreign expertise and was hard to be benchmarked against current professional institutions.
“Therefore, their fees had to be benchmarked against international standard fees,” he said.
He offered Fadillah and Rahman another presentation of the detailed fee structure.
“We would like to meet up with BEM and we hope that you (Fadillah) and Rahman could join in for the meeting where we will again present our detailed fee structure together with our consultants,” Zarul said.