Pakatan may cut Petronas’ yearly RM30b dividend to Putrajaya
Ida Lim, The Malaysian Insider
Opposition Leader Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim will push Petronas to cut its annual RM30 billion dividend to Putrajaya if the Pakatan Rakyat (PR) that he leads win in the coming general elections, business newswire Bloomberg.com reported today.
PR will instead set Petronas’ dividends to the country at a fixed percentage of the firm’s profits, allowing the state oil firm to spend more on investments overseas that will give better profits, PKR strategic director Rafizi Ramli said.
“Petronas should be left to run on a purely commercial basis,” he told Bloomberg when explaining Anwar’s plans.
According to Bloomberg, a PR administration is likely set up a parliamentary committee in Malaysia’s Dewan Negara to improve transparency over Petronas, which currently reports to the prime minister.
Petronas is widely-regarded as the country’s piggy bank, with Reuters reporting this July that it is Malaysia’s largest taxpayer and biggest revenue source, funding 45 per cent of the government’s budget even as the country’s continues its run of huge budget debts.
Petronas chief executive officer Shamsul Azhar Abbas had, in September, said the firm should change its current model of paying RM30 billion annually to Putrajaya and pay 30 per cent of its profit instead, Bloomberg reported.
Another key policy change by PR to boost the country’s oil reserves and revenue will be to get Petronas to buy more oil blocks overseas and cut down on exploring small local oil sites.
PR reportedly said that this overseas investment approach could be a better way to gain more from the RM300 billion that Petronas will be spending over the next five years.
“There’s a higher probability you’ll strike bigger reserves should those resources be deployed to discover oil blocks overseas.
“We’ll lose out in the long-term from opportunity lost, especially when the Chinese are particularly agressive in acquiring blocks around the world,” Rafizi said in an interview with Bloomberg last Tuesday.
