PETALING JAYA: While not all defence projects can be made public, the cost of each stage of construction for the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) project should be for the sake of transparency, says a defence analyst.
Nusantara Academy for Strategic Research senior fellow Azmi Hassan said security concerns were a legitimate reason for secrecy but the veil should be lifted on the LCS project.
Azmi said the Navy had initially wanted 12 ships but the number was reduced to six and now five.
“Part of this is due to mismanagement. Besides the progress of the ships, the actual cost for each stage of construction involved needs to also be made public because this is not a cheap project,” he added.
Azmi said the public should also be assured that the exact cost is balanced with quality.
This follows the announcement that Boustead Naval Shipyard Sdn Bhd (BNS) will provide progress reports on the LCS to the government every three months.
“The most important part of this particular monitoring is not that the report be made public every three months but that the steering committee makes some information available to the public so that they will know, at least in layman terms, the progress of this project.
“In terms of security I feel not all information can be divulged,” he said.
Azmi added that the status of the already acquired equipment must be included as there is concern the ships would be equipped with obsolete equipment.
He said the equipment must be up to date in terms of technology and the ships must perform as expected.
“If the committee is not satisfied with the progress made by Boustead, then, yes, the report should be debated, whether it be done in Parliament or in a smaller committee.
“If there are problems in the progress, it should at least be debated at the technical level by the Public Accounts Committee (PAC),” he said.
He added that it was important for at least one or two ships to be completed by next year to address the country’s maritime security concerns.
Meanwhile, Centre to Combat Corruption and Cronyism (C4) founding director Cynthia Gabriel called for the quarterly reports to be transparent and made public.
She said the matter is a “serious public concern” and must be debated in Parliament.
“This is a serious compromise to our national security and is a breach that teeters on treason,” she said.
BNS, in a statement to The Star, said their reports would be detailed, “including on equipment and systems to be bought”.
“The report is to be done through the project monitoring committee which is headed by the secretary-general of the Finance Ministry as well as the Defence Ministry.
“From time to time, and in this case every quarter, the PAC will call for updates on the progress as well.
“At this stage, those are the forums on which these reports will be updated,” it said.
BNS added that any decision to debate the reports would need to be made by the government.
It said the commitment to produce the reports was already in place and was not a recent decision.
“It has been since the very beginning,” it said, adding that the current focus was to ensure the first ship is completed by the projected November 2024 timeline.
Timelines for the other ships have been “disclosed to the relevant forums”, it said in the statement.
The LCS project became a controversy after the PAC revealed that not a single ship had been completed even though the government had paid BNS RM6.083bil.
