The Ministry of Road Transport and Bridges (MoTB) has moved to ink deals with two more Chinese companies despite having an agreement with one for constructing costly Dhaka-Chittagong expressway which, officials said, is a breach of normal practice.
Although in most of the cases memorandum of understanding (MoU) signed with different companies does not bear any value, they said the fresh deals will jeopardise the government's plan to construct the Dhaka-Chittagong expressway under public-private partnership (PPP).
But ministry sources said, the concerned department took the decision to sign agreements with more companies to arrange funds from more than one sources as a large number of Chinese companies recently expressed their interest to implement the billion-dollar expressway project,.
"Recently, the Road Transport and Highways Division (RTHD) wrote separate letters to the Economic Relations Division (ERD) seeking permission to sign MoUs with two more Chinese companies," said an official.
He, however, said the ERD is yet to reply to the first letter written on August 8 seeking permission for signing MoU with Chinese Railway Construction Corporation International Ltd.
The second letter sent to ERD was to sign MoU with Poly Technologies.
The RTH Division signed the first MoU with China Harbor Engineering Company Ltd in February. The company has already submitted feasibility study and design for implementing the project.
Sources said at least six Chinese companies have requested the Ministry to sign MoU for implementing the same project under government-to-government (G2G) arrangement.
The ministry officials said the MoUs were signed with the concurrence of the ERD and this time there is no exception.
But ERD officials said they never give permission to sign any MoU for any project as they are not the authority. They said the RTHD under the MoRTB mostly wrote to the ERD and it categorically informed about the same.
"Giving any concurrence to signing of this kind of MoU is not within the ERD's rules of business," ERD additional secretary Mohammad Asifuz Zaman told the FE.
He said due to lack of any system, in most of the cases this kind of MoU does not carry any value.
However, the ministry's move to sign more MoUs has also made the Roads and Highways Department, the implementing agency of the expressway project, confused about the government's plan.
Project insiders said feasibility study and detailed design work of the expressway are going on with the support of Asian Development Bank and the Bank has also given positive signal to provide funds up to Comilla.
"We are still working hard to manage lowering of the US $8 billion project cost. But involving Chinese companies has made us confused as arrangement in that case would be different," said one of the officials.
According to the project office, the government first took the initiative to construct the Dhaka- Chittagong Expressway in 2009 on PPP basis to ease traffic congestion on the corridor and boost trade within and outside the country.
The initiative was taken considering huge traffic to be generated in the corridor being the lifeline of the economy and having link with the Asian Highway and other regional corridors including the BCIM.
However, the first initiative was fruitless after the Roads and Highways Department (RHD) got no response from any firm in a bidding under PPP arrangement called in 2012 based on the routes studied in 2007.
Later the ADB came forward with its technical support to make the project viable and working with its consultants finalised design of the route and to lower the project cost from $ 8.4 billion to $ 3.2 billion.
They said recently the steering committee finalised the route which is to be constructed along the existing Dhaka-Chittagong corridor through Daudkandi, Comilla and Feni.
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