My Take | Transport chief comes off rails at terminus
Public allegedly kept in the dark over ceremony handing over controversial port area at West Kowloon cross-border express terminal to mainland authorities
If there were demerit points for government officials like drivers, transport and housing minister Frank Chan Fan would have reached the limit, and then some.
Penalised drivers have to take a mandatory safety course. What would it be for bumbling ministers? Not getting the boot, though, since our government has an extreme tolerance for incompetence.
The MTR construction fiasco at the Sha Tin-Central link would have sent Chan back to management retraining. The latest row is over a “secretive” handover ceremony of the checkpoint area administered by the mainland at the cross-border express terminus in West Kowloon. How about public relations 101 for Chan?
The public was allegedly kept in the dark over a 15-minute ceremony on Monday night to hand over a 105,000 square metre port area to mainland authorities, represented by Guangdong provincial government deputy secretary general Lin Ji.
The public and the press only knew about it when the government released a picture of the two men shaking hands.
Critics denounced it as “secretive”. Officials couldn’t agree on what it was. A government press release called it “a ceremony” where 100 mainland and Hong Kong officials attended. But after the controversy broke, Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor, the chief executive herself, said it was only “a little working level handover procedure”.