BY IZWAN IDRIS
In his speech at the opening ceremony, Jokowi pledged to speed up project awards and implementation as Indonesia sought to attract fresh foreign investment into the country’s infrastructure sector. He commended the highway concessionaire for finishing the project in just two-and-a-half years.
JAKARTA: UEM Group Bhd, the construction arm of Khazanah Nasional Bhd, plans to expand its highway concession business in Indonesia after winning President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo approval for completing the country’s longest toll road project ahead of schedule.
The 116.8km Cikopo-Palimanan stretch (pic) was open to traffic at midnight on Sunday. PT Lintas Marga Sedaya, in which UEM Group has 55% stake, is the concession holder for 35 years.
The RM3.53bil project was awarded in 2006, but it took more than six years to complete land acquisitions and the required approvals before construction works started in 2013.
In his speech at the opening ceremony, Jokowi pledged to speed up project awards and implementation as Indonesia sought to attract fresh foreign investment into the country’s infrastructure sector.
He commended the highway concessionaire for finishing the project in just two-and-a-half years.
“The UEM group is looking at various opportunities in Indonesia,” Lintas Marga’s president director Datuk Roslan Ibrahim told a group of Malaysian reporters after the ceremony.
“We have done some studies here and are very keen to participate in some of these projects,” he added.
Roslan, who will be appointed chief operating officer of UEM Sunrise Bhd in September, said the group would focus its overseas expansion strategy on four key areas namely expressways, engineering and construction projects, township and property development, as well as asset and facility management contracts.
The Cikopo-Palimanan toll road is UEM group’s first highway concession in Indonesia.
It also made the company Indonesia’s second largest highway concessionaire behind state- owned PT Jasa Marga.
Described as the missing link in the Trans-Jawa, the Cikopo-Palimanan highway project connects Jakarta to Cerebon in the western part of the Jawa island.
Initial estimate put daily average traffic volume on the highway at 26,000 vehicle a day.
The project is the biggest construction job under taken by a Malaysian-Indonesia joint venture company and comes under the private public partnership programme.
Indonesia’s Finance Minister Bambang Brodjonegoro said in March that country needed an estimated 5,000 trillion rupiah (US$400bil) over the next five years to build new roads, seaports and power plants.
The bulk of this new investment would have to come from overseas.
There are at least 35 different toll roads in Indonesia, mostly concentrated in the main island of Jawa. Only a-fifth of these toll road are longer than 30km.
