CHITTAGONG: The Chittagong Port Authority (CPA) is leasing out its three container vessels procured for the Pangaon Inland Container Terminal (ICT) to a private party for not having expected business on the Chittagong-Pangaon route. The CPA said it was incurring financial losses every month on account of the three vessels as it has no required workforce including crew.
The CPA is handing over the three container vessels to Summit Alliance Port Ltd, a private operator, early next month.
“We have been incurring a large amount of financial loss on account of the ships procured for Pangan ICT as we don’t have the required workforce to operate the three vessels. We don’t even have pilots for the ships,” said CPA Member (admin and planning) Md Zafar Alam.
He told this correspondent on Friday that they were going to sign a contract for leasing out the vessels to the Summit Alliance Port Ltd on September 2.
Md Zafar Alam said the port authority would now get Tk 0.128 million (Tk 1.28 lakh) everyday from the company from the date of signing the contract.
The CPA cannot run the ships any more as the Pangaon ICT, set up at Keraniganj in Dhaka, had remained almost unused for the last 20 months.
The Pangaon ICT, constructed by the CPA at a cost of Tk 1.77 billion (Tk 177 crore), started container handling from December 2013 to carry containers between Chittagong Port and Pangaon ICT but has remained almost idle since then.
The CPA procured three vessels – Pangaon Express, Pangaon Success and Pangaon Vision — from Malaysia at a cost of Tk 500 million in late 2013.
The government has issued 32 licences to the ship builders to build ships for the Chittagong-Pangaon route. Sources said about eight ships were likely to join the fleet of vessels for carrying containers by December next.
The terminal was constructed with a target to handle 0.116 million TEUs (twenty-foot equivalent units) of containers annually and to avoid hassles and excessive expenditure of the stakeholders using the Chittagong-Dhaka highway.
But the terminal could not draw business for many reasons, port officials said. They said the terminal could not attract the importers and exporters even after repeated publicity campaigns.
