Questions over MH370 search funding shortfall

Australia is relying on Malaysia to fund a potential $100m shortfall in the search for flight MH370.

Warren Truss last month announced China would provide a vessel to search for the MH370 jet. Picture: Kym Smith

Australia is relying on Malaysia to fund a potential $100 million shortfall in the search for Flight MH370, as it emerges that a survey vessel promised by Malaysia to join the search never showed up.

Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss’s office would not produce any public statement from the Malaysian government in which it committed to meet the remaining cost of the search, and the Malaysian high commission did not respond to a similar request.

The Weekend Australian can also reveal that while nearly two months ago Mr Truss, whose transport portfolio covers the search for the Malaysia Airlines plane, said a Chinese vessel would join the search this ­summer, none has appeared; his department did not say when one would.

The federal government has taken prime responsibility for the search for MH370, which dis­appeared on March 8, 2014, on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, because its presumed final resting place, in the southern ­Indian Ocean, is within Australia’s search and rescue zone.

The hunt will be called off once the designated 120,000sq km target zone has been searched, ­expected in June.

Australia has committed $60m to the cost of the search, and China has recently committed $20m in “assets and financial ­contribution”.

In a statement this week to The Weekend Australian, the Joint Agency Co-ordination Centre, set up within Mr Truss’s department to orchestrate the search, said: “It is expected that the underwater search may cost up to $180m.’’

Asked how the $100m gap, understood to be the result in part of a declining Australian dollar against a US contract with the Dutch Fugro survey group whose three ships are conducting the search, would be met, Mr Truss’s spokesman said: “Malaysia has committed assets and financial contribution to fund the balance of the cost of the underwater search.”

The spokesman would not provide a copy of the tripartite agreement he said embodied the commitment, or produce any other corroborating statement from the Malaysian government.

Since the Boeing 777 was ­Malaysian-registered, under international aviation law Malaysia is charged with investigating its ­disappearance.

This point has been repeatedly stressed by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau when asked why, rather than work on the dominant opinion put by commercial airline pilots and other aviation experts that MH370 was hijacked by its captain, it relies on a theory consistent with the pilots becoming unconscious due to lack of oxygen during decompression or otherwise “unresponsive.”

Early last month, Mr Truss said “within the coming months a fourth vessel to be provided by China will add to the search ­effort’’.

Recent weekly bulletins from the joint co-ordination centre about the search have made no mention of a Chinese vessel joining the effort.

“Any new vessel entering the search will be announced at an appropriate time, prior to it arriving in the search area,” a co-ordination centre representative said.