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COMMENT | It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that both the Kuala Lumpur-Singapore High-speed Railway (HSR) the East Coast Rail Line (ECRL) will not be money-making ventures.

As Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad himself said when calling off the HSR deal on Monday, "We will make no money at all from this operation.”

The high-speed train would have sat on a 350km track, but only 15km or four percent of this would have been built on Singaporean land. Yet it is the island republic which is dictating the terms for the RM110 billion project – especially for competitive benchmarking and international bids.

This probably explains why construction has yet to commence, despite the deal being inked over five years ago. Even its completion date was pushed back by six years to 2026.

But the decision to scrap the project will come at a great cost, with Mahathir estimating that the penalty for withdrawing from the bilateral agreement will come up to about half a billion ringgit. "This is a final decision, but it will take time because we have an agreement with Singapore,” he said.

A high-speed rail link between Kuala Lumpur and Singapore had previously been proposed in the late 1990s, but was shelved soon after due to high costs.

In 2006, YTL Corporation revived the proposal, but the government pulled the plug two years later, again citing concerns over the price tag – RM8 billion, compared to the RM110 billion today...

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