Hong Kong's HK$71.5b express rail debacle down to poor supervision and execution: experts
Poor supervision and execution led to delays and higher costs on HK$71.5b project: expert panel
The Highways Department and railway powerhouse the MTR Corporation have respectively failed in their roles to supervise and execute a HK$71.5 billion high-speed link to Guangzhou that is now plagued by delays and a budget overrun, an independent expert panel says.
Completion of the Hong Kong section of the Guangzhou-Shenzhen-Hong Kong Express Rail Link has been pushed back by two years to 2017, and its budget has snowballed to about HK$71.5 billion from HK$65 billion.
And the MTR Corp's corporate culture of "discouraging elevation of bad news without solutions" was partly to blame, the three-member panel said.
Also at fault was the MTR project team's "over-optimism" about the completion date and overreliance on measures it believed, without verifying their effectiveness, would minimise delays, according to the panel's 187-page report, unveiled yesterday.
On the part of the department, it failed to supervise the project's progress and lacked a master mechanism to define overall delivery strategies, roles and obligations between the MTR, the government - its controlling shareholder - and other parties involved, the report said.
In July 2013, the department's consultant, Jacobs China, estimated a potential delay of almost 11 months to July 2016, but the department did not ask the MTR to review in depth the works progress, the report noted.