FINANCE Minister Audley Shaw said yesterday that at no time did he say that money would be moved from the south coast highway project to build the Montego Bay bypass, as stated in a Sunday Observer story.

“In the speech I said the agreement as announced by the previous Government made no economic sense to spend US$500 million from Harbour View to Morant Bay. I also said that the money would have to be re-scoped to do much more work on the entire south coast corridor, including May Pen to Mandeville, as well as going to Port Antonio and do a section from Morant Bay to Cedar Valley,” Shaw said in a letter to the editor, referring to a speech he made in Montego Bay last week.

“All this was confirmed by the prime minister at the press conference on Thursday. At no time did I say that money would be moved from the south coast highway to build the MoBay bypass. In fact, I made it clear in my speech that this would have to be a separate loan from the China EX-IM Bank,” he added.

Shaw noted that a press conference was called to clarify the matter because it was reported elsewhere that “we were abandoning the south coast highway without reporting that there would be a re-scoping to get much better value for money from the China EX-IM bank loan of US$326 million matched by US$58 million by the Government of Jamaica, for a total of US$384 million for these roads”.

“So instead of using all this money plus well over US$100 million for land acquisition to build a toll road to Morant Bay (totalling over US$500 million), which we could never justify economically, we decided to split up these funds as follows:

• Harbour View to Yallahs — US$110m

• Yallahs to Port Antonio via Morant Bay – US$74m

• Morant Bay to Cedar Valley – US$1m

• May Pen to Williamsfield (toll road) – US$188m

“All this for a total of US$384 million instead of what was originally proposed, and with the high traffic segment from May Pen to Williamsfield tolled to help service the loan. That’s a classic difference between the businesslike managerial, value-for-money approach of the JLP Government compared with the previous Government.

“This, of course, is the significant point to be made instead of misleading and false information about diverting money from St Thomas to MoBay,” Shaw said.