Taken for a Ride by ERL
Apr 23rd, 2008 by Steven
I felt cheated - spelled capital CHEATED - when I read Citizen Nades’ piece ‘Non-users Pay the Price’ in The Sun last Monday. It’s akin to robbing Peter to pay (compensate) Paul.
Despite what has been reported, there is a taxpayer subsidy to the current express rail link operated by the YTL group between Kuala Lumpur and the Kuala Lumpur International Airport. This is in the form of a charge imposed on every passenger who takes a flight out of KLIA. Effectively, all flyers subsidize the rail link, whether they take it to go to KLIA or not. …part of the deal and how else could visitors and Malaysians have been suckered (albeit legally) into paying RM6 for this every time they left the KLIA for a foreign destination.
Don’t you think the people have literally been taken for a ride by our government and the people behind the ERL? It is utterly preposterous. Can anyone advise whether we can file a claim?
The next thing that comes to mind is the proposed mega RM8 billion KL-Singapore bullet train project. I’d prepared this post last night, and by coincidence, the papers report today (see here and here) that the government has put it ‘on hold due to the high cost’. The government’s u-turn is despite what YTL Corp CEO Francis Yeoh having said: “This project is economically viable, so I think the government will listen to the people and put this project an urgent basis again.” Hmm…one of those rare occasions when the government decides not to listen to the people!
If the project gets the greenlight, I really wonder what grand scheme of things will be cooked up to squeeze money from the man-on-the-street?
Amazing how contracts are entered into in Malaysia. Other governments have pension liabilities due to aging population, we probably have contract liabilities that our children have pay for generations to come.