Pakatan Harapan today proposed that highway concessionaires be given priority to participate in future highway projects in exchange for them not increasing their existing toll rates.

PKR secretary-general Rafizi Ramli said this 'first right of refusal' mechanism was a common practice in commercial agreements and would not cost the rakyat anything.

Under this mechanism, the concessionaires will be granted the priority to participate in future highway projects.

"They may not get profit from their current concessions but they can be sure of a steady revenue flow as they will participate in the future highway projects," he said at a press conference in Kuala Lumpur.

The concessionaires of 18 highways caught the nation by surprise yesterday by announcing the toll hike up to 100 percent, effective Thursday.

The Works Ministry claimed the government had to compensate the concessionaires RM1 billion to keep the toll rates at the new level.

Rafizi criticised the Works Ministry for not being able to come out with innovative and practical moves to reduce the rakyat's burden.

"The 'first right of refusal' suggestion can be done immediately without costing the public anything," he noted.

Pakatan Harapan’s precursor Pakatan Rakyat, in its policy manifesto Buku Jingga, had proposed to take over highway concessions with the intention of gradually abolishing tolls.

According to Rafizi, the methods can serve as a short-term remedy for Putrajaya which the opposition coalition offered without charging the BN government a single sen.

Use local costing method for petrol price

Meanwhile, Rafizi also urged Putrajaya to use local costing in determining the crude oil price, rather than continue to adopt Singapore's formula of using the US dollar.

According to the Pandan MP, the government had adopted the mechanism since the 1980s, when the most accurate method was to obtain the information from local petrol companies, as the majority of the petrol was processed by local refinery.

The current method has become irrelevant especially when the ringgit to US dollar had plummeted this year, he argued.

This had caused consumers to pay 35 sen extra per liter for RON 95 petrol, said Rafizi.

"This also made Malaysians continue to get expensive petrol despite the price of crude oil having dropped globally.

"This is due to the weakness in Najib's administration," he said.

The shift to local costing is easy if the government calls in all the petrol companies and have them agree to a uniform crude oil cost, he said.

The players can sign non-disclosure agreement if they were concerned with confidentiality issue, he said.

If Putrajaya were to use local costing in determining the petrol price, the consumer will only need to pay RM1.70 per liter for RON95, instead of RM2.05.

The vocal lawmaker said the government was aware the current method would cause the rakyat to pay more for petrol but it just refused to act, he claimed.