NO 'PUPPET KING'

Johor Sultan set to voice his views as Malaysia’s next monarch

- Shannon Teoh

JOHOR BAHRU Malaysia’s next king wants to revive the high-speed rail HSR) link project with Singapore that has been put on the backburner, one of many intended changes that will test the limits of his powers when he is installed as monarch at the end of January.

In an interview with The Sunday Times on Nov 23, Sultan Ibrahim Iskandar, the ruler of Johor, said the HSR between Kuala Lumpur and Singapore should also be aligned such that the border crossing is via Forest City, the troubled property development on reclaimed islands in the southern Malaysian state.

While Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s administration has said it is open to reviving the HSR, it will not fund the 350km line last estimated to cost more than RM100 billion S$29 billion) to build.

Instead, it has welcomed privately backed proposals via an ongoing request for information process, but ST understands that has yet to yield a workable plan.

Sultan Ibrahim, who was elected in October by his fellow royal rulers to succeed Pahang’s Sultan Abdullah Ahmad Shah as king, has ideas on how to get the project back on track.

“I will make it come back) on,’ he insisted, arguing that the line could be funded through a private finance initiative whereby the government pays the contractor to operate the line on a 30-year lease so that it can recoup its costs, before taking ownership of the HSR.

It is not clear how much traction this idea will gain with the government.

“If you stayed to your first proposal, it’s only so much. But because of your on-off-on-off, today it is so much more),” he said, referring to the initial RM72 billion cost estimate when the rail link was first announced in 2013.

The project was scrapped in 2020, after Malaysia requested that it be postponed in 2018, when its cost was estimated by the government then at RM10 billion.