Works Minister Fadillah Yusof has refuted DAP secretary-general Lim Guan Eng's accusation that the North-South Expressway was operated by government cronies.

He said in 2011, the government had privatised Plus Highways Berhad to rationalise the overall toll structure of all highway concessions in the Plus Group and prevent unnecessary toll increases.

Fadillah said not a single share of the concessionaire was owned by what Lim considered as private "cronies". Instead, 51 percent was owned by the government and 49 percent owned by the Employees Provident Fund (EPF).

"I am incredulous that YAB Lim considers the 14.55 million EPF members as 'cronies'," he said in a statement today.

He said EPF's ownership of Plus highways allowed its members to receive a stable return every year from a mature cash-generating asset.

Fadillah added that due to the timely move to privatise Plus, it should be noted that tolls charges for the North-South Expressway had not been increased for the past 11 years.

"In fact, with the introduction of certain discounts and rebates in recent years, actual toll rates for the North-South Expressway have also gone down," he said.

Why North-South Expressway can't be free

Fadillah said Lim yesterday had accused the Barisan Nasional government of only looking after its cronies to earn extraordinary profits at the expense of 30 million Malaysians by allowing the North-South Expressway to continue collecting toll charges unjustifiably.

Lim was also reported yesterday to have urged the government to make the Plus Expressway a freeway, saying that the concessionaire had already made more profit than the actual construction cost of RM5.9 billion.

According to Fadillah, some time last year, Lim had also asked the tolls for the Plus highways to be abolished and called for road tax collection to pay for the maintenance and upgrade costs.

"The RM2.4 billion yearly road tax collection alone is not enough to maintain the Plus highway systems, on top of the 50,000km of toll-free federal roads and still provide annual allocations to individual states to maintain their state roads," he added.

He said the spending on the highway made up to about RM1 billion yearly for operating costs, maintenance, patrolling and upgrading of the 986.5km highway system and billions more to widen the roads to three or four lanes in order to alleviate congestion.

He noted that under the federal government’s Malaysian Road Records Information System, billions were allocated to the state governments to maintain their state roads.

"This includes about RM500 million to Selangor this year, while Penang received RM94.4 million in 2014, RM101.5 million in 2015 and RM107.6 million for 2016 from the Federal Government," he added.

He hoped the Penang chief minister would spend more time to understand the true situation instead of issuing populist statements by irresponsibly using the "crony" label.

- Bernama