Two weeks after he surprised everyone by openly denying any collusion between government and business in his policy address, Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa asked one of his ministers to defend an oft-cited example of alleged collusion - Cyberport.
In a lengthy article published in the Post and other newspapers on Wednesday, Secretary for Commerce, Industry and Technology John Tsang Chun-wah defended the government decision in 2000 to award the Cyberport contract to Pacific Century Group, now PCCW, without going though a competitive bidding process.
Maybe Mr Tung and other senior officials are so tired of seeing Cyberport being cited repeatedly as 'evidence' of collusion that they want to set the record straight one more time.
Their wisdom in reopening an old wound is questionable, however. The arguments Mr Tsang spelt out in his article had been made in 1999, when Cyberport was the talk of the town and legislators and property developers vociferously called for open tenders.
The minister said no tenders were called because of the need to build Cyberport within the shortest possible time, the need for heavy, upfront investment, and the benefits of a public-private partnership model that could bring forward the project's completion, reduce the government's capital contribution and transfer the public risk to the private-sector partner.
These arguments failed to satisfy the critics then, and they are not going to do the trick now. Democratic Party chairman Lee Wing-tat, one of the legislators who spoke out against the project then, was quick to take aim at Mr Tsang.
