Renewed pressure on industrial projects

Therdsak Thaveeteeratham, senior vice president of Asia Plus Securities, said after the Central Administrative Court refused on Friday to give the go ahead to a subgroup of 30 suspended projects, that all 64 suspended projects could no longer appeal for relaxation of the requirements. To get up and running, they must conform to the law.

Under the charter, all of the suspended projects have to conduct a health impact assessment (HIA) and hold a public hearing, as well as seek opinions from the yet-to-be-established independent environmental body. One of the 30 projects is PTT's sixth gas separation plant.

Therdsak said the projects would more likely be frozen for 12-14 months since the suspension order came out in September. That would shave Bt7.2 billion off the combined 2010 earnings of the affected listed companies.

"Market sentiment should be negative on Monday. As the government tries to fix the problems to get the projects up and running again in a shorter timeframe, stocks under the Siam Cement Group have seen significant price increases since late 2009. How, the pressure is renewed," he said.

Analysts would now focus on how long each company would actually take to complete the environmental steps, he said.

Bantoon Setthasiroj, spokesman for the four-party panel addressing the issue, expects the delay to be shorter than 12-14 months, as the procedures should take six to eight months.

Since these projects have already won approval for their environmental impact assessment (EIA), they could start working on their HIA right away.

The HIA and public hearing should take three to four months, but the temporary independent environmental body should be set up in three months, so it should be ready to review any HIA, which would take about two months.

The panel's chairman, former prime minister Anand Panyarachun, also highlighted the need for all projects to follow the Constitution or the conflict would run on forever.

He reminded the projects that no matter what activities appear on the Natural Resources and Environment Ministry's list of those with serious environmental impacts, they would have to conduct an HIA as instructed by the court. The companies are under consent to follow the rules, he said.

The Central Administrative Court on Friday refused to review the requests for the 30 projects to proceed. It specified that these projects have not yet complied with Article 67(2), and thus are still under suspension according to the Central Administrative Court's order on September 29 and the Supreme Administrative Court's order on December 2.

Srisuwan Janya, president of the Stop Global Warming Association, said the developers of the 30 projects filed their appeals with old information that the court had already reviewed.

"All of them must comply with Article 67(2), or the EIA plus HIA. Once the process is complete, they can file for court approval to restart," he said.

He also heard that some projects had made secret agreements with villagers for the public hearings, though the public hearing rules stipulate that each project needs to be open for public opinion 15 days before the voting date, which must not take less than three hours. He threatened to file legal complaints against these projects.

The Federation of Thai Industries plans a conference of affected companies this week. FTI chairman Santi Vilassakdanont was quoted by Matichon daily as saying that it is becoming clearer that the projects would be delayed by more than the eight months expected, and the impact would extend to the project contractors.

Today, the Natural Resources and Environment Ministry is hosting a meeting with the Council of State, Industry Ministry, FTI and National Health Committee to discuss the list of activities with serious impacts.