There is much more at stake than first meets the eye over the MTR debacle spilling out from the two-year delay in completing the Hong Kong section of the express rail service to Guangzhou.

It would "definitely affect the pace of the Pearl River Delta's integration," said Guangzhou policy adviser Zhang Tianxiang, who added: "All sections of the key projects must be completed and connected at the same time. If one part is delayed, the whole plan will be affected."

He pointed out that the mainland section connecting Shenzhen and Guangzhou had already been completed but would continue to attract poor passenger usage until the link to Hong Kong was up and running.

A still more somber line was taken by Dang Li, of the Guangdong Academy of Social Sciences, who said: "The delay will make our regional integration progress look bad in the eyes of Beijing if one project falls behind, all will fall behind."

Another issue that Hong Kong must confront is whether there is a case for contractors to recruit 2,000 laborers to achieve the new deadline of 2017. Undoubtedly they would be recruited from over the border, but would they enjoy the same wages and conditions as their Hong Kong counterparts - or would they get a worse deal and therefore not be willing workers?

Furthermore, they will probably have to be housed in one or two camps along the border for the duration of their contracts. This leads to the obvious question for the inhabitants of any of our border towns - would you like to have 1,000 or so husky strangers living in your neighborhood?

Another point - if we end up accepting 2,000 mainland laborers for this project, could their presence pave the way for another even larger bunch of mainland laborers to be brought in to provide some of the sweat and muscle required to build a truly stupendous project, the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge at a jaw-dropping cost of an estimated HK$120 billion?

Returning to the express rail project, the rather abrupt clearance of Tsoi Yuen Tsuen village in Yuen Long in 2011 still rankles not just with the villagers who were uprooted to make way for the rail line, but with the indigenes living in many other hamlets who are painfully aware that they, too, might risk the same fate as growth and development continues across the New Territories.

Then there is the important issue of how much extra the two-year delay will cost the MTR. When the question was brought up at the MTR's outrageously overdue media briefing the other day, it was revealed that besides the estimated project cost of HK$67 billion, there is a contingency fund of HK$4.4 billion, which it was suggested would likely make up any deficit.

And as we are all aware, that briefing went faster than the express trains of tomorrow oops, 2017.

In 30 minutes the MTR confessed in a roundabout way, blaming the delay on a series of factors - last month's heavy rains and the resultant flooding, unexpectedly complicated and near-impenetrable geological problems on site, and damage to a tunnel-boring machine so extensive that it could take nine months to repair.

Now for the most intriguing question of all - with whom does the buck stop? Surely the man mainly responsible is the Secretary for Transport and Housing Anthony Cheung Bing-leung.

His ludicrous remark that "I was totally caught by surprise" will dog him for the rest of his days. Displaying a breathtaking naivety he added that he "had only heard of the delay a few days earlier when the news broke."

Who is by far the biggest shareholder in the MTR, and therefore the one that will suffer most from the delay? It is none other than the Hong Kong government, which is the employer of Anthony Cheung.

One has to ask when senior government officials are supposed to be monitoring through their membership in the MTR Corporation's governing board and fail to detect such a major boo-boo, if there might be a serious accountability issue which either the Ombudsman or the Audit Commissioner ought to look into.

And surely much of the responsibility - not only for the delay but for "sitting" on the news about it for so long, and allowing his staff to regularly deny that any delay was going to occur - is the enigmatic American CEO of the MTR, Jay Walder.

He was recruited from the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority, where he held a similar post, and earlier had been in a senior railway transport position in London.

Not everybody hailed his appointment. One local blogger tweeted: "Why Walder? New York's trains were old and dirty under this guy's management."

Walder began work here as the MTR's CEO-designate on Dec 1, 2011, and on Jan 1 2012 began a 30-month initial contract. Interestingly, that contract now has only a couple of months to run.

The author is the op-ed editor of China Daily Hong Kong Edition.

(HK Edition 04/30/2014 page9)