Sarawak Chief Minister’s Vast Holdings Revealed
A Swiss NGO says Abdul Taib Mahmud’s holdings span the globe and then some
The two NGOs previously reported that Taib’s children are the shareholders and directors of numerous companies controlling residential and commercial buildings in Canada, Australia, Britain and the United States together worth hundreds of millions of US dollars. Many of the assets came into their possession when they were in their early 20s and were still college students with no visible access to legitimate resources to invest.
ASIA SENTINEL
The looting of the riches of the Malaysian state of Sarawak has earned the family of Chief Minister Abdul Taib Mahmud billions of US dollars through investment in as many as 400 companies in 25 countries, according to allegations by an NGO that has been stalking him for months.
Research by the Switzerland-based Bruno Manser Fund said official documents show the Taib family stake in 14 Malaysian companies alone is worth US$1.46 billion. The fund has uploaded all of the documents onto the Internet. They can be found here: http://stop-timber-corruption.org/resources.
However, the fund said, its research only covers publicly available information from Malaysia’s Registry of Companies and other official documents and the total of all of the Taib family’s holdings could run well in excess of that amount.
“Not counting their more hidden wealth, this puts the Taib family firmly into the category of one of the richest families in the world and makes them far richer than the Queen of England (whose assets are a mere half billion pounds),” the fund said.
In all, according to the fund, named for a Swiss environmentalist who disappeared in Sarawak in 2000 while trying to aid the Penan tribe, the family also has stakes in companies in Australia (22 companies), Bermuda (1), the British Virgin Islands (7), Brunei Darussalam (1), Cambodia (1), Canada (9), the Cayman Islands (1), Fiji (3), Hong Kong (7), India (2), Indonesia (3), Jersey (1), the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (1), Labuan (1), New Zealand (5), the People’s Republic of China (2), the Philippines (1), Singapore (2), Sri Lanka (1), Thailand (2), the United Arab Emirates (1), the United Kingdom (4), the United States of America (6) and Vietnam (1).
On May 12, in the wake of previous revelations by the Bruno Manser Fund and another reform NGO, the Sarawak Report, Swiss President Micheline Calmy-Ray announced that she was asking Swiss financial authorities to investigate the chief minister’s assets held in Swiss financial institutions. In a letter to the Bruno Manser Fund, Calmy-Ray indicated that if the probe finds evidence of corruption from timber sales, Taib’s Swiss assets could be frozen. There has been no indication of the progress of that probe.
At the time, a Taib spokesman said the funds had been legitimately deposited and that there was no evidence of criminality.
Allegations are that as chief minister, Taib granted timber access permits to a plethora of companies, most of them owned by ethnic Chinese, that have denuded much of the state, Malaysia’s largest, of much of its tropical rainforest. The two NGOs previously reported that Taib’s children are the shareholders and directors of numerous companies controlling residential and commercial buildings in Canada, Australia, Britain and the United States together worth hundreds of millions of US dollars. Many of the assets came into their possession when they were in their early 20s and were still college students with no visible access to legitimate resources to invest.
Although the two NGOs have filed numerous complaints with the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission, the anti-graft agency only reluctantly agreed to investigate Taib’s holdings after the Swiss decision. A well-placed source told Asia Sentinel at the time that the MACC had no choice but to do so in the face of an international probe or face embarrassment. But, the source said after the new allegations, “that investigation has gone cold.”
