This follows offers Putrajaya has received from private companies to resume the search, according to sources close to the deal for a new search.
Said to be most favoured by the government is the “no-find, no-fee” offer by US company Ocean Infinity.
This is despite Dutch company Fugro, which was involved in the earlier two-year search effort, also making an offer to continue the search for a “low fee”.
According to the daily, Ocean Infinity will use six HUGIN autonomous under-water vehicles capable of operating at depths of up to 6000 metres to collect high-resolution data at what it says are “record-breaking speeds”.
The tempting offer from Ocean Infinity is also said to have placed more pressure on the Malaysian government to restart search efforts.
Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai was reported to have said earlier this month that Putrajaya was considering the new search offers.
Australia, China and Malaysia, which jointly coordinated and funded the search operation led by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), announced in January that it had called off the A$200 million (RM660 million) search for MH370 despite the protests of families of those onboard.
The disappearance of the Boeing 777 on March 8, 2014, on a flight to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur, has become one of the world’s greatest aviation mysteries.
The ATSB released a 440-page final report on the unsuccessful search for flight MH370 on Oct 3, where it concluded that the reasons for the loss of the aircraft could not be established with certainty until the aircraft was found.
MH370 disappeared on March 8, 2014, en route to Beijing from the Kuala Lumpur International Airport, with 239 passengers and crew members on board.
The aircraft was thought to have been diverted thousands of miles off course out over the southern Indian Ocean before crashing about 2,000km off the coast of Western Australia.
“It is almost inconceivable and certainly societally unacceptable in the modern aviation era… for a large commercial aircraft to be missing and for the world not to know with certainty what became of the aircraft and those on board,” ATSB said in its statement when it released the report.