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Dr Tortrakul Yomnak, president of Tace, a 28-year-old civil-engineering consultancy, has taken up a new role as director of an advanced construction-management programme at privately run Sri Patum University.

Given his extensive experience in the construction industry and academia, Tortrakul, a former president of the Engineering Institute of Thailand, will attempt to highlight the business side of construction management rather than its technical aspects.

"In Thailand we already have more than 50 different civil-engineering programmes offered by both public and private universities. Most are run by civil-engineering faculties, so they tend to focus on the technical aspects of construction management.

"In other words, engineers and architects are predominant when it comes to managing construction projects while building contractors and business managers are usually not given enough attention.

"Such a style of management is outdated, so we'd like to play up the role of building contractors and business managers in our master's-degree courses. This means more emphasis on cost-and-time management as it affects the developer's cash flow.

"In addition, we want to highlight the marketing, entepreneurial and other aspects of the real-estate sector," he said.

In addition to his consultant's track record, Tortrakul was also a real-estate developer during the previous Asian financial crisis, giving him real-world business experience.

"Back in 1994-5, I developed a 400-unit residential condominium called Phra Thai Place next to the BTS mass-transit network.

"Back then the project was worth around Bt1 billion as the selling price was just Bt40,000 per square metre. It was sold out in 3-4 months, but later on we were almost in trouble due to the consequences of the Asian financial crisis.

"We had to switch our project financiers at the last minute, just before our previous ones were shut down by the government.

"We did survive eventually, while most developers at the time went bankrupt, resulting in massive non-performing assets," he recalled.

Besides business competence, Tortrakul is an advocate of ethical business practices.

"One of my proudest works over the past two to three decades is the Bt5-billion 13th Asian Games sports-centre project at Thammasat University's Rangsit campus a few years ago.

"We got the consultant work, worth around Bt100 million, through a competitive and fully transparent bidding, which wasn't the norm for public works in Thailand.

"I could say that transparency is our big problem as there is widespread corruption among politicians wanting take a cut of taxpayers' money.

"Construction and related work in the public sector are worth several hundred billion baht annually. Usually, 5-30 per cent is paid under the table to corrupt officials and politicians.

"For some types of work, such as a landscaping subcontract worth a few million baht, the asking rate could be as high as 40 per cent, because work could be scaled down enormously to save costs so that a big chunk of money could be paid under the table.

"In the olden days, corruption usually started during the bidding process. Then dishonest consultants were brought in to facilitate the cheating. More recently, they've turned to rigging specifications to favour certain bidders.

"Today the methods of cheating have become very sophisticated, so it's very difficult to bring the wrongdoers to justice. A case in point was the controversial multi-billion-baht procurement of CTX baggage scanners for Suvarnabhumi airport," he said.