Siphoning Money From Sarawak
Sarawak Report
Last week, with shocking deceitfulness, Taib Mahmud announced in a video that he and his children have always avoided doing business in Sarawak:
“I don’t want conflict of interests to haunt me all the time. If I do business inside the country, people will say I use my influence to enrich myself, so we did it outside the country.”
But, haunt him we will for the very reasons he spelt out! Because, there is a mountain of evidence about the billions of ringgit, which are quite clearly on the record as having been siphoned out by the Mahmud family through their public banking activities alone. All this business was done in Sarawak and Malaysia.
Taib Banks – how they do benefit from his influence
Take a look at UBG Bank (formerly Bank Utama), which was owned by the Taib family company CMS until November last year. The Chairman of UBG was none other than Taib’s son, Abu Bekir, and his number two was Taib’s son-in-law (daughter Hanifah’s husband), Syed Ahmen Alwee Asree.
Doing Big Business in Sarawak! – Chairman and Deputy Chairman of UBG Bank, (left) Abu Bekir Taib (son) and (right) Syed Ahmed Alwee Asree (son in law)
UBG has been making hundreds of millions for these chaps. Just look at their shareholdings and look what they have just sold them off for. People who accuse Sarawak Report of providing unsubstantiated evidence are clearly people who find themselves unable to freely download basic Annual Reports and Stock Market announcements from the internet. This makes them either unqualified to comment or liars.
From the records it is clear, for example, that until 2007 UBG, controlled a third of the shares and an over-all 60% stake in Malaysia’s fourth largest bank RHB! So how much was that worth to the Taib family? A series of recent public sales have provided all the figures we need to find out.
Cashing in – how much was it worth?
A lot of trees had to come down to buy up a 60% stake in Malaysia’s fourth largest bank!
During 2007 it was known that the Taibs were trying to get their money out of these RBH shares, because three attempted commercial sales fell through in a matter of months. It was commented that Taib was not getting a high enough bid for his liking!
However, luckily for the Taibs a publicly-run body came in and offered a very good price for the shares after all. That public body was none other than the Employees Provident Fund (EPF). This is Malaysia’s largest pension fund for civil servants and it is managed by a Board dominated by politicians and business leaders.
EPF paid UBG and its Taib family shareholders a hefty RM 1.4 billion in cash for that share of RBH. That was money from the ordinary pensions of public employees into the Taibs’ own bank accounts.
In Taib’s own words such a cosy deal indeed exposes the Chief Minister to ”accusations of conflict of interest” and “using his influence to enrich himself” by doing business in Sarawak and Malaysia!
After all, among those public figures on the Board of EPF is none other than Taib’s own good friend the Sarawak State Secretary, Y.B. Datuk Amar Haji Mohamad Morshidi Abdul Ghani, whom we exposed as a major landgrabber just last week! Why wouldn’t Mr Ghani return the favour of all those lands given to him by Taib through helping him achieve this very lucrative deal – funded by the pensions of millions of public workers?
In just the same way EPF has rushed to the rescue of the Bakun Dam project. When no private investor would touch it, EPF ploughed RM5.75 billion into the white elephant, thereby resuscitating the venture and hugely enriching the Taibs’ family firm CMS once more, as a result of the numerous contracts they have acquired on the project.
And Taib claims he does no business in Sarawak or Malaysia and there is no conflict of interest? What madness!
More money out of UBG
After selling off its RBH shares so profitably UBG was soon benefiting again from all that influence in local circles. It snapped up two companies Putrajaya Perdana Bhd and Loh & Loh Corp Bhd and then made a private issue of new shares to a single company Majestic Masterpiece that increased the total equity of the company from around RM 800 million to around RM 1.5 billion.
