Politics

Three variation orders added 62 million ringgit to a highway interchange contract

The Negeri Sembilan Interchange Authority approved a third change order in June. The revised completion date has slipped twice since the contract was signed.

By Serena Yeoh · 21 July 2026 · 3 min read

Case names, entities and officials in this report are composite and illustrative. References to public bodies describe their statutory role only.

Three variation orders

The Negeri Sembilan Interchange Authority has approved three variation orders on its contract to rebuild the Bukit Palong interchange since the contract was signed in March 2025. The orders, filed in September 2025, February 2026 and June 2026, together add 62 million ringgit to the original 210 million ringgit contract value.

Each order is a short document: a description of the added scope, a cost, and a signature from the authority's project director. None of the three states the reason the added scope was not included in the original design, which the authority's own procurement guide asks project teams to record where practical.

The contractor named on the original award, and unchanged across all three variation orders, is Bukit Palong Builders Sdn Bhd, which had held its trading licence for eleven months when the tender closed in late 2024.

Bukit Palong Builders Sdn Bhd was one of four bidders on the original tender and was not the lowest-priced bid; the evaluation summary lists it as strongest on technical capacity and construction schedule, the two criteria the authority's own scoring framework weighted most heavily.

What each one covers

Variation order one, worth 19 million ringgit, covers a redesign of the interchange's drainage culverts after a site survey found the original design did not account for a groundwater table higher than the initial geotechnical report had indicated.

Variation order two, worth 24 million ringgit, covers an additional slip road not in the original design, requested by the authority itself according to the order's own text, though no separate approval document authorising the request is listed in the file.

Variation order three, worth 19 million ringgit, covers utility relocation works for an underground cable route the original design assumed would not need moving. A relocation notice from the utility operator, dated four months before the variation order, is not listed among the documents cited in the order itself.

The revised completion date

The contract's original completion date was December 2026. The first variation order pushed this to April 2027; the second, to October 2027. The third variation order does not state a revised completion date, leaving the file's most recent stated date at October 2027 pending a further filing.

The authority's project dashboard, updated monthly, shows physical progress at 41 percent as of June 2026. The original contract's milestone schedule sets the interchange's completion date at December 2026, later revised to April 2027 and then October 2027 through the first two variation orders.

A construction schedule addendum filed alongside variation order two states that the additional slip road adds an estimated fourteen weeks to the critical path. The completion date moved from April 2027 to October 2027 between the first and second revisions.

Cost recorded so far

Combined, the three variation orders raise the contract value from 210 million to 272 million ringgit. The authority's own contract management policy flags any cumulative variation above 20 percent of original value for a mandatory review by its full board rather than approval at project director level.

The file released to date does not include a board review record for this contract, though the cumulative variation total crossed the 20 percent threshold with the second order in February 2026, five months before the third order was filed.

What has not been published

The authority has not published a reconciled project cost summary showing the three variation orders alongside the original budget lines, which several comparable interchange projects in the authority's own portfolio do publish as a routine document.

A request for the board review record referenced above was lodged with the authority's disclosure office and remained unanswered as this report went to press. The authority has not stated whether the review took place, was waived, or remains pending.

The authority's portfolio page lists eleven active projects; three of those, all outside the Bukit Palong interchange, carry a published cost reconciliation table updated each quarter, which this contract's page does not yet include.

Three variation orders in fifteen months, raising the contract from 210 million to 272 million ringgit, with no board review on file. That combination is what should prompt a direct question, not a shrug.