The true story of Sime Darby — Dr Chan Chin Cheung
Without Sime Darby, which eventually became the flagship of the Permodalan Nasional Berhad, non-Malay billionaires, some of them foreigners, would not be created during the NEP period.
Dr Chan Chin Cheung, The Malaysian Insider
Poor Datuk Seri Ahmad Zubir Murshid, I sympathise with his present predicament. He was not the first executive of Sime Darby to be mired in circumstances which went beyond his control — the force of historical circumstances which dated back to November 1976.
All these began on Jan 2, 1972 when I proposed to a high government official that Malaysia would be well-placed to have a conglomerate of its own at the inception of the New Economic Policy (NEP) conceptualised by the team led by the Father of Development, Tun Abdul Razak, a statesman.
At that point, I had not the faintest idea what it was all about. All I knew was that my Malay contemporaries were very keen to do business. They grew up with me in the environs of higher education in the United Kingdom in the 1950s. We were all fired up with the things we could do in a socio-economic way.
Eventually, we all returned and I by force of circumstances became a planter. Then, I could see my Malay friends were quite poor compared with myself. Also, I realised the British dominated the banking, the plantation and tin mining sectors, because the biggest rubber estate owned by a Chinese then was only 7,000 acres and the non-Malays from the urban areas did all the menial business and the hard and unrewarding work at the leading edge of the nascent ‘independent’ Malaysian economy.
The change came with the NEP which promised to give all Malaysians a new beginning.
I thought without a huge business entity controlled by the Malays with the co-operation of the non-Malays, we, the Malaysians, would be mired in unhealthy competition socio-economically amongst ourselves.
This would lead to self-destruction because 70 per cent of the Malaysian economy at that point was still controlled by the British, not the Chinese. We would be getting at each other’s throats for third class assets.
Without Sime Darby, which eventually became the flagship of the Permodalan Nasional Berhad, non-Malay billionaires, some of them foreigners, would not be created during the NEP period.
Hence, I proposed that a Malaysian-owned and managed conglomerate should be established or acquired. By chance in October 1973, Sime Darby was involved in its first scandal concerning its chief executive, and Pernas Securities moved in with the tacit support of the Minister of Finance and the Prime Minister, who both had this great foresight to do what was best for Malaysia on free market terms.
