BINTULU: The Member of Parliament for Bintulu Dato' Seri Tiong King Sing
urged PETRONAS and its subsidiaries to enforce a precautionary measure to
avoid their main contractors from causing difficulties to local
sub-contractors.He suggested that they should also initiate a comprehensive preliminary
studies to identify eligible local contractors who had the capabilities and
to be given top priority in mammoth projects such as the MLNG Complex
development.
In a statement released here on Thursday, he said that by doing so, he
believed it would gain the locals confidence in participating and enjoying
the fruit of development.
"At the same time, mulpractises of multi-level contracting could also be
avoided," he added with reference to a recent dilemma highlighted by 34
companies here who had not being paid by a main contractor for the MLNG
Revamp Rejuvenation (MRR) project.
The main contractor, Petara Sdn Bhd, was claimed by the companies for owing
them more than RM4 million and Tiong recalled that similar incident had also
occured during the progress of the MLNG Dua project previously.
Should the claims staked by the sub-contractors turned out to be genuine,
Tiong called on the MRR to play their role by assisting the sub-contractors
to solve the matter amicably.
He also urged the foreign companies or Peninsular-Malaysia based companies
not to take advantage of the local contractors by leaving them in such
agony.
>From information that he gathered after contacting the Petara's office at
Kuala Lumpur, Tiong had learnt that the company was in fact making losses in
the contracted project and presently the company had been appealing to
PETRONAS for cost-cutting to minimise the losses.
