A Key Question for Taib
Who is the owner of the Taib family’s real estate fortune?
Elegance – the Taib Residence in Kuching
Sarawakians are entitled to a clear answer, backed by documentary evidence, as to who actually owns the Taib family’s massive property portfolio. A politician such as Abdul Taib Mahmud ought under law to be required to declare all his assets, so that he can be held accountable. However, he does not.
The Chief Minister earns just 20,000 Malaysian Ringgit a month, yet his family owns a property empire worth hundreds of millions US dollars in countries across the world. So far, the story that the Chief Minister has sought to maintain is that his entire family (male and female, young and old), are excellent business people, who suddenly and simultaneously discovered their talents in the early 1980s, right after he took power, and built their fotune through legitimate means or grand marriages to wealthy foreigners.
- Taid Transport – a bullet proof rolls royce
Property worth billions of ringgit
Surely this highly dubious contention needs at least to be proven against the far more obvious conclusion that the ultimate ownership of much of this property remains with the Chief Minister, who has amassed a phenomenal fortune at the expense of his people?
The Chief Minister should lay out before the Legislative Assembly proof that he is not the owner or beneficiary of any of his family’s assets and submit to independent financial scrutiny, as is routinely done in countries like the UK. Not to do so would be to admit to the electorate that he is indeed the aged kleptocrat (an old thief who rules) that he is widely considered to be.
Home is the place to start
Living like a Raja
In laying out these proofs Taib should first address the questions surrounding Sarawak’s largest business conglomerate CMS. This huge company is largely made up of assets which have been ‘privatised’ from the State, meaning that these assets once belonged to the people. Yet, according to CMS’s own annual report of 2009, over 85% of the shares of this publicly listed company are directly owned by the Chief Minister’s closest family members. Given the ‘privatisation’ of the CMS holdings was overseen by Taib Mahmud in his capacity as combined Finance Minister and Chief Minister during the 1990s and given his family’s almost total acqusition of this publicly listed company, he needs to explain how there could have been no conflict of interest.
This means the Chief Minister must spell out how the ‘privatisation’ of a state company into a personal family possession could have appeared to have been in the public interest, which is his duty in office to uphold. The profits of CMS now go directly into the Taib family bank accounts instead of the public purse. At current stock market prices the 329,445,840 shares listed in the CMS Annual Report of 2009 are worth 823,614,600 Malaysian Ringgit. This means that CMS alone is worth well over half a billion ringgit to the Taib family.
