MRT project may derail

Although the government has threatened to find a new contractor to build the mass-rapid-transit system that will connect CKS International Airport to Taipei City, the build-operate-transfer (BOT) project's winner yesterday said it has no intention to back out of the plan.

"We'll never give up on our hard-won bid," Roger Sun (孫麟), executive vice president of Evertransit International Development Corp (長生公司), told the Taipei Times yesterday.

The proposal will be revised to resolve the dispute, he said.

Sun made the comments after Minister of Transportation and Communications Lin Lin-san (林陵三) reportedly told local media earlier this week that the project will be awarded to the No. 2 bidder, BES Engineering Corp (中華工程), if Evertransit fails to secure financial support on its own.

During negotiations with the ministry's Bureau of Taiwan High Speed Rail (高鐵局), Evertransit proposed that the government provide a fund of NT$40 billion needed to expropriate 1,400 hectares of private land for the construction of the NT$140 billion public transit system.

"The government should be fully aware that such a multi-billion project will be financially infeasible and hard to complete without government financing," Sun said. The NT$40 billion is only a government loan which would eventually be repaid 10 years after the land is sold."

The government seems untouched by Evertransit's new proposal, which the ministry claimed breaks an agreement with the company that says the government is not responsible for any funding for a BOT-type project.

On Wednesday, Lin said that the ministry may also publicly re-open another round of bidding to all new contenders if Evertransit fails to sign a formal pact with the high speed rail bureau before July 9.

Compared with the north-south high-speed rail, another BOT project, Evertransit apparently obtained less attention from the government than Taiwan High Speed Rail Corp (THSRC, 台灣高鐵), which had previously promised to raise its own funds for the project. But the government then decided to provide the THSRC with a NT$280 billion medium and long-term loan while investing a total of NT$8 billion in the project in exchange for shares.

The government was under fire yesterday for adopting double standards on BOT projects. But the high speed rail bureau disagreed.

"Each BOT project is different and should be looked at on a case-by-case basis. The government has made clear its requests in its initial agreement with Evertransit. The agreement should be fully respected no matter what," said the bureau's spokesman, who refused to be identified.

BES Engineering, the possible new negotiation partner tapped by the government yesterday, however, is not in a hurry to rush in.

"If Evertransit fails to meet the terms of the contract, we'll review the cause of the contract breakdown and related legal connotations before deciding the takeover," Shen Hwa-yeng (沈華養), a spokesman for BES Engineering, said.

Some BOT projects in Taiwan do need government funding, Shen said. But he refused to say whether Evertransit's request was "reasonable."