Lincoln Leong: the man to put the Hong Kong MTR back on track?

Lincoln Leong Kwok-kuen knows he is stepping into one of the most intensely scrutinised jobs in the city. What's more, he's taking over as CEO of the MTR Corporation at one of the roughest times in the railway giant's history, as cost overruns and delays dog its ambitious expansion programme.

"Obviously, one of the key priorities in the next few years will be to overcome the complex challenges of the rail projects we are building … to bring the convenience of rail travel to passengers in even more corners of our city as soon as possible," Leong says in a written reply to a inquiry.

The MTR has taken on five huge railway projects in recent years yet only one, the recently opened West Island Line, has been on time. The others - the South Island Line, the Sha Tin-Central Link the extension of the Kwun Tong Line and, most contentious of all, the high-speed link to Guangzhou - are behind schedule by between six months and two years each, mostly due to construction problems.

"The 16,000 colleagues at MTR … work extremely hard every day to keep the rail system [running] … and the new rail construction progressing - it is not easy and at times we make mistakes," he says. "The important thing is to learn from such mistakes and to work hard to continuously improve."

Perhaps conscious of how a perceived lack of transparency helped finish off his predecessor, Jay Walder, Leong made an apparent attempt to manage public expectations when he met the media last week. He warned that building costs for the delayed projects could rise further. On the Guangzhou line, he said the corporation would again review cost estimates and the target completion date.

There was public outrage last year when the corporation revealed that the line - the costliest railway on the planet by distance - would not open until at least 2017, two years after the target. It further emerged that management failed to inform the corporation board of the risk of delays and cost overruns. The scandal took on a political dimension, with accusations of lax oversight by the government, the MTR's majority shareholder.