Harbour Fest Event –

comments collected from Engineering Functional Constituency

In response to your invitation to give comments on the captioned event, I have asked over 4,000 members of the Engineering Functional Constituency to give their own views which form the basis of this submission.

At the time of writing, 29 engineers have made known their views which are summarised below:

n The government should not have given the American Chamber of Commerce a free hand in organising the whole event, as the latter had no relevant experience

n Too much funding committed to the event without appropriate oversight of its implementation

n The event was too ambitious with too many performances staging in such a short period of time

n The event had been run in a not-so-transparent manner

n The shortfalls in both the Original Budget (OB) and the Projected Actual Account (PA) came together to a round $100 million. The increase in revenue from OB to PA was almost offset by the increase in expenditure by the same amount. In fact, it turned out that the government had to take on the shortfall of $100 million. The coincidence has fueled suspicion

n The wide discrepancy in the figures between the OB and the PA hints that the original budget was drawn up in a very incompetent manner

n Queries on whether the government had exercised due care and diligence in overseeing both contracting provisions and its subsequent execution to ensure that the public funds were duly spent

n A couple of respondents believe that LegCo should share the blame as its members had no insight on the matter. A small number of engineers demanded that the responsible parties should be identified and responsible officials be disciplined

n Several engineers who had attended individual concerts considered they were a major success

Suggestions from respondents:

n The Independent Panel of Inquiry should focus on factual findings and causes of the confusion with specific reference to similar events held in Hong Kong

n The government should not sponsor this kind of event in cash. Other means such as provision of venue rent-free or at a discount could be considered

n Similar events should be run on a more commercial basis with open bidding arrangement

n Greater transparency of how the government spends the public money

I hope that you will find the above comments and suggestions relevant to the inquiry of the Independent Panel.

(signed)

Dr the Honourable Raymond Ho Chung-tai