So Who Owns CMS?
MR300 million. Taib awarded the contract to his own company
Sarawak Report
Sarawak’s Chief Minister has issued not one word about our expose revealing him to be the majority owner of Sakti International, the Taib’s multi-million dollar property company in the US. Clearly he does not want to test our documented evidence in court. So let us reach some logical conclusions about the Taib family´s other sources of wealth.
In his joint capacities as Chief Minister and Finance Minister, Taib ’privatised’ most of the assets that now form CMS Sarawak from state-owned companies. CMS is supposed to be a public company with shares quoted on the open market, yet staggeringly more than 85% of these shares are owned by close members of Taib’s own family. The question therefore is how many of these are actually held in trust for the Chief Minister in the same way that he attempts to hide his true ownership of Sakti International?
The logical assumption is that Chief Minister directly owns at least 50% of CMS Sarawak
The Chief Minister has made only the barest attempts to conceal his real control and ownership of Sarawak’s largest company, CMS. It is Sarawak’s biggest open secret. For years the largest single shareholder in the company was a woman of no independent means – his own wife Laila! After her death her shares finally passed to the Chief Minister’s sons, who already owned huge numbers of shares.
Thanks to our recent expose on Sakti International, we now know how the Chief Minister organises his business affairs. Our documentary evidence shows how he put up his children and brothers as the official shareholders of Sakti International, while privately getting them to sign a concealed agreement ensuring half the shares were held in trust for him.
Would the Chief Minister like, therefore, to deny that he owns at least 50% of the shares of CMS Sarawak, the backbone of the Taibs´vast family wealth? At the very least it is now incumbent on him to prove that he does not. It is time for an open and independent audit of Sarawak’s largest company, which for years has been the lucky recipient of all the state´s top contracts thanks to the decisions of the Chief Minister and his Finance and Planning Ministers (all three of them himself).
