BANGKOK Land, the Thai capital's biggest property company, has been picked by the government's Metropolitan Rapid Transit Authority (MRTA) to negotiate and build an elevated mass transit system.
The MRTA's consultants, De Leuw Carther International, said Bangkok Land offered the best scheme for building the planned 20-kilometre loop of elevated railway at a projected cost of about US$1.3 billion. Two other companies, Tanayong and Thanachart Holding, are ranked second and third.
Bangkok Land's turnkey contractors will be Thai Leighton and Bouygues Thai, associates of Australian and French groups respectively.
The US-German AEG Westinghouse group will supply equipment. Ironically, Leighton and AEG, as the Euro-Asia Consortium, bid for this contract in the 1980s when it was known as the Skytrain project . Skytrain's original concessionaire, Canada's Lavelin-SNC group, was fired last year almost two decades after the project was conceived.
Anant Kanjanapas, chairman of Bangkok Land, joins the long-running game of trying to beat the political in-fighting and planning inertia, which has so far prevented one metre of mass transit track being laid to relieve Bangkok's appalling traffic.
But Mr Anant is unusually ambitious and confident: he surprised the financial community in October by announcing a US$600-million convertible bond issue in the international market to fund the MRTA project before he had even won it.
