The "lie" is not referring to you, so you don't need to get worked up by it. Recently I have heard this "urban legend" multiple times, even on transportation forums from HK (and I have certainly heard it before), so I have reason to believe it is propagated by certain people who are against public transit/railways/MTR in particular. Besides, "lie" is hardly "extreme language". Anyway:
While I would be happy to stand corrected........
In respect of MTR's operations.....I'm not sure that I'm wrong (That's HK's system for those trying to follow)
I went over to their website and read their books from the last fiscal year.
Now I will grant you they show an operating profit on their rail lines.
However....
What they include in those revenue allocations bares scrutiny.....'Station and Commercial Revenue" is a very big line item, it is also discrete from fare revenue.
As Stations do not spontaneously produce money aside from collected fares, one must assume that developments within or on-top of stations are producing revenue which is being directly attributed to the rail system.
If one were to reduce the revenue of the HK system to fare revenue (now I realize there are ads etc. ) ...
And then charge the full weight of system expenses the profit is all but wiped out.
Depreciation costs are not broken out for Rail vs property development and so hard to allocate to an outsider, but if one assumed an allocation that was even in proportion to gross revenue, then the rail system's profit is basically gone.
If, we assume from the MTR books that depreciation represents wholly a cost to rail operations, and is not charged to development (because this was done prior to showing development profits) then one would likely show a net loss for rail operations.
Stations in HK do "spontaneously" produce money, because within most stations there are a large number of shops that include everything from clothing stores to fastfood restaurants to banks to bakeries to convenience stores, and it's not even part of an "underground city" type of thing like Toronto's PATH. These shops are an integral part of the system, and exists only because of the rail operation, so I think it is perfectly valid for them to be included. Finch has done a comparatively good job with its retail, but it's more of an exception than the rule for TTC stations; in any case, rental revenue from these is also included in TTC's operating revenue.
I'm also unsure how your math works. Even if we only consider the fare revenue (11467M), taking away the operating expense (8303M) still leaves $3.2 billion HKD ($475M CAD) in profit, so it's hardly "wiped out".
Even if you take out the complete amount of depreciation and amortization (2930M) you still have a profit (the merger was a one time thing so need not be counted, but still would not have been enough to dip it into the red). The only way it will show a loss is to include the interest charges, but that's only after unreasonably excluding other revenue and including expenses which are attributable to property development and which also contribute to those interest charges.
Edit:
Relatedly, I was unable to find out how much the governments initial investments represented and whether they were represented on the books as debt, and I wonder how one might value the land concessions and the benefit of expropriation which MTR has made use of in order to construct its rails and related developments.
What is being discussed here is profit/deficit from operation. (Almost) all transit constructions require substantial initial subsidy from the government and usually more favourable treatment in terms of land usage/sales/compensation and such, so for the purpose of discussing the cost-effectiveness and efficiency of a public transit
operation, those costs need not be taken into account --- this is also relevant because many transit systems in the world are built by the government and then run by private organizations on contract/franchise and so the initial capital cost would not be calculated into their budget at all, and given enough years the construction cost of the systems would (could) be completely repaid and so the "steady state" would be to only consider operation costs/revenue. Bottomline is, how costly the initial construction was does not affect how efficiently the system is
run. In TTC's financial statement for its operations, construction-related debt or land transactions certainly aren't accounted for (why should they when operation is being considered?), but that certainly doesn't make its books look any better. (financial statements of US transit operators do include debt, which make their deficits look worse than they already are)