But Frederick Ma Si-hang insists he is ‘confident’ the project will be completed by 2018
ALLEN.AUYEUNG@SCMP.COM
PUBLISHED : Friday, 01 January, 2016, 10:17am
UPDATED : Friday, 01 January, 2016, 12:37pm
Ma visited MTR staff at Tsing Yi station early this morning as New Year’s Eve passengers travelled. Photo: Bruce Yan
The new chairman of MTR Corporation warned early this morning it would be a challenge to secure extra funding from lawmakers to finish Hong Kong’s long-delayed high-speed railway link.
MTR currently was short HK$19.6 billion to finish the city’s portion of the Guangzhou-Shenzhen-Hong Kong Express Rail Link and sought the amount by March.
To keep the project running, the government last year proposed to ask the Legislative Council to approve HK$19.6 billion in extra funding by February. Almost exactly the same amount would eventually be recouped through a special dividend to be paid by the MTR, subject to its shareholders’ approval.
Frederick Ma Si-hang, the new MTR chairman, said that while he expected minority shareholders of the corporation to support the plan to issue the special dividend at a meeting in February, legislators might not agree to give it the money.
“Looking at how stock prices are trending now, it seems minority shareholders will support the proposal,”said Ma, marking his first day as railway chief today by visiting his staff members working overnight at Tsing Yi MTR station at 1:30 am on New Year’s Day.
“If we get approval from the minority shareholders, the next step is to go to the Legislative Council.
“This will be a difficult challenge because everyone knows the Legislative Council has many problems, including filibustering,” he added. “March is our deadline [to secure the funding].”
Although Ma said he knew the government’s suggestion of setting up a joint immigration checkpoint at the West Kowloon terminus was a cause for concern among some lawmakers, he said MTR had no control over it.
“MTR has no role in this matter,” he said. “It has to be solved by the government.”
Ma also revealed MTR had yet to obtain the right to operate the Hong Kong section of the high-speed railway and hoped the government could start discussions on the operation within this year.
Despite all the financial and policy uncertainties, Ma said he remained “confident” the rail project could finish by the third quarter of 2018.
In July, Ma was appointed by the government to succeed Raymond Chien Kuo-fung, who was MTR’s chairman for 12 years.
Appealing to the public to “bear with” occasional delays in train services, Ma said his first task was to boost the morale of his frontline staff members, who he said “had to withstand a lot of pressure”.
“For example, some passengers spat on our staff, or swore at them. I saw some videos of them. I felt very unhappy,” he said.
When asked how he would mend MTR’s relationship with musicians in the city after a dispute last year over the company’s policy on carrying large instruments in trains, Ma stressed that a transport operator must put the greater community’s interest above all else.
“If you take a musical instrument that is too big, you may affect other passengers,” he said. “We have to do many balancing acts.”
As for the MTR’s future calculation of train fares, criticised by some lawmakers for being unfair, Ma said a review of the fair adjustment mechanism could only start after ongoing studies were completed.
He added that income from train fares was an important source of revenue for MTR because it spent HK$6 billion each year on repairs.
Ma, 63, quit his job as commerce minister in 2008 for health reasons after serving as Hong Kong’s Secretary for Financial Services and the Treasury from 2002 to 2007 .
Since 2013, he had been an independent non-executive director of MTR Corporation.
http://m.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/economy/article/1896924/new-hong-kong-mtr-chief-faces-funding-challenges-citys-long
