The Man Who Lied About LRT3 Now Has Questions About ART
Rosli Khan and the RTS Project: When Should We Stop Listening?
There is a particular kind of commentator who has mastered the art of dressing up speculation as expert analysis asking loaded questions, invoking alarming figures, and positioning himself as a fearless public interest crusader.
Rosli Azad Khan has built a career on exactly this formula. Malaysians should know by now what it is worth.
This is not conjecture. It is documented, court-recorded fact.
The Court Record Speaks for Itself
In 2022, Rosli Azad Khan was forced, under a consent judgment recorded in the Kuala Lumpur High Court, to issue a full, unconditional public apology to Malaysian Resources Corporation Berhad (MRCB) and its subsidiary, after authoring articles about the LRT3 project on Free Malaysia Today.
In his own signed words, Rosli admitted:
"There is no truth in the Impugned Statements... The Impugned Statements contained in the said Articles are completely false, unjustified and unsubstantiated and are defamatory in nature."
He further admitted causing the MRCB Group "considerable distress, inconvenience and embarrassment as well as damage to their reputation."
This apology was not issued voluntarily out of a sudden crisis of conscience. It was the outcome of legal proceedings, Kuala Lumpur High Court Civil Suit No: WA-23CY-43-09/2018, in which Rosli had no credible defence to mount. The apology was ordered to be published on Free Malaysia Today and The Vibes.
You can read it here: https://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/nation/2022/07/01/apology-by-rosli-azad-khan-to-the-mrcb-group
And yet Free Malaysia Today continues to publish him. And yet readers continue to be served his "analysis" without a single word of editorial context about who this man is and what he has already been found to have done.
The Same Playbook, A Different Project
Cite a large, alarming number (this time, RM7 billion). Question the procurement process without evidence. Invoke public interest and "the rakyat." Demand investigations and clarifications. Walk away having planted doubt, with zero accountability for accuracy.
In his LRT3 articles, the ones he was forced to retract, he questioned the jump from RM9 billion to RM16.63 billion, demanded investigations, and implied wrongdoing by the project delivery partner. Every single one of those claims was subsequently admitted by him to be false and unsubstantiated.
Now he is at it again. The RM7 billion figure attached to the proposed DOM Industries and MMC Corp consortium for the RTS feeder is cited ominously, with no serious technical breakdown, no comparative cost analysis, and no acknowledgment that large scale urban transit infrastructure, particularly elevated systems spanning multiple corridors, routinely runs into billions. For context, Singapore's Thomson East Coast MRT Line, covering 43km, cost approximately SGD25 billion. Scale and complexity cost money. That is not a scandal. That is engineering reality.
His Technical Arguments Do Not Hold Up
Rosli raises concerns about APM type systems, citing the KLIA Aerotrain and Singapore's Bukit Panjang LRT as examples of troubled comparable systems. This framing is deliberately misleading.
The KLIA Aerotrain is an airport people mover, a closed loop shuttle system serving a single terminal precinct, bearing virtually no resemblance to a city wide feeder transit network.
Comparing the two is not analysis. It is rhetoric designed to sound credible to readers who may not know better.
As for the Bukit Panjang LRT, yes, it has had operational difficulties. It has also undergone a comprehensive upgrade programme by the Land Transport Authority of Singapore, with significant service improvements reported since 2020.
Singapore's own LTA has documented this progress.
Selectively invoking its past problems while ignoring its rehabilitation is intellectually dishonest.
Rosli also treats Minister Loke Siew Fook's earlier stated preference for the
Autonomous Rail Transit system and the reported royal endorsement of that system as though any evolution in planning represents a betrayal or worse. Infrastructure planning does not work like a social media poll.
A Request for Proposal issued by UKAS in March 2025 for the ART system is part of a legitimate procurement process. The fact that a consortium has proposed an alternative, and that it remains at letter of intent stage, is entirely normal.
The Bigger Question Nobody Is Asking
Free Malaysia Today, to its credit, has broken genuine stories of public importance over the years. But its continued platforming of Rosli Khan, without any editorial disclosure of his court recorded defamation history, raises serious questions about editorial standards.
Readers deserve to know, when they read a byline, whether that commentator has previously been found by a court to have published false and defamatory content on the very same platform, on a very similar subject matter.
That is not a minor footnote. It is directly relevant to how much weight any reasonable reader should assign to his commentary.
Rosli, for his part, undertook in his court recorded apology to "not author any articles and/or comment on the LRT3 Project." He is now applying the same methodology to a different project. Whether that technically breaches his undertaking is a matter for lawyers. Whether it should concern editors and readers is a matter of basic common sense.
Conclusion
Malaysia needs serious, rigorous, independent scrutiny of its public infrastructure spending. The Johor RTS project, a landmark cross border transit link, deserves exactly that kind of scrutiny, given the billions of public funds involved and its long term impact on the region.
What it does not need is manufactured alarm from a commentator who has already been proven in court to have fabricated similar concerns about a similar project, issued a grovelling public apology, and then quietly resumed the same pattern under a different project name.
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