Is Taib slipping under growing pressure?
By Clare Rewcastle Brown, FMT
In an act of crazy stupidity, Sarawak’s Chief Minister Taib Mahmud has responded to growing condemnation of his family’s illegitimate wealth by claiming that others in Sarawak are poor because they “do not have it up here” (tapping his head)!
What he meant is that, unlike his own “clever” children, most Sarawakians are too stupid to make money.
But, surely it is he who is stupid to say such things? We can already see from his actions how Taib holds his people in disdain.
He has stolen from them and provided only a pittance to the desperately poor Dayaks in his richly resourced state.
But, even the most monstrous dictators usually avoid going on record admitting such disdain!
Under pressure
Taib made his remarks in a recent recorded interview, in which he attempted to deal with the growing slew of revelations about his family’s wealth.
That interview was then posted on his own official website.
The plan had been to stage questions from a tame reporter so that the chief minister could counter the allegations that his family have been “creaming off” the wealth of Malaysia’s richest state
However, he immediately responded with an enormous lie. He claimed that he and his family had always avoided doing businesses inside Sarawak in order to avoid being “hounded” by accusations that “I used my influence to enrich myself”.
In fact, anyone who knows anything about Sarawak knows that the opposite is true.
All the members of Taib’s family are up to their eyes in business in Sarawak, benefiting and enriching themselves from state contracts, plantations and timber concessions handed to them by Taib himself.
Indeed, just last week the DAP revealed that 90 acres of prime state land, worth some RM225 million, had been sold for just RM2.5 million to a company, Shoreline Development Sdn Bhd, which is owned by his own four children, his uncle and his timber crony, Samling.
This scandal broke just days after the state government had announced it could only afford to allocate a paltry RM3.47 million to alleviate the suffering of the hardcore poor in Malaysia’s richest state.
Even the stupidest Sarawakian could work out that if Taib had tendered those 90 acres in an honest manner, then that sum could have been increased immediately to over RM225 million!
Instead, he gave that profit to his already fabulously wealthy children!
Loading insult onto injury
Showing the dangerous effects of an old age and complacency, Taib nevertheless blundered on in this interview and compounded his lies to reveal just how self-deluded he has become.
He explained that by doing business outside the country, clever people like himself and his children can easily make themselves rich.
“Anyone who is clever can make themselves rich over 30 years” he claimed.
