Declassify sale of Sabah’s Desa Cattle
Former Sabah CM Salleh Said Keruak and ex-state minister Lajim Ukin were in the centre of another swept-under-the-carpet blunder involving the cattle farms in Sabah and Australia.
Selvaraja Somiah, FMT
The latest update on the National Feedlot Corporation (NFC) debacle is an ugly reminder of Sabah’s own blunders and the absolute need to be free from the present breed of politicians who run politics as business.
Sabah has had its own controversial acquisitions.
Desa Cattle, a brainchild of former Chief Minister Harris Salleh was a brilliant idea to see Sabah become self-sufficient in dairy and meat. But within 15 years of its inception, politicians having their own agenda destroyed it.
In the centre of this blunder is Salleh Said Keruak and Lajim Ukin.
At the time of the ‘sale’, Salleh was then Sabah CM and Lajim the State Agriculture Minister.
The project was a cattle farm and dairy industry. It was in the 1990s and Sabah was become the flagship in cattle and diary industry.
The Sabah government ran a cattle farm in Darwin Australia and the state had actually reached 100% self-sufficiency in the production of such meats in 1998.
At that time, the commercial cattle farm was owned by Desa Cattle Sdn Bhd, a subsidiary of Village Development Corporation (KPD) that was operating in Mesilau, Sook in Sabah and in Darwin, Australia.
Then Salleh and Lajim Ukin decided to sell the farm in Darwin Australia.
They also sold the remaining thousands of acres of Desa Cattle land in Sabah to Kim Loong a West Malaysia group.
Salleh Said Keruak
Controversial deal
Lajim has of course denied any direct involvement. His contention is that the sale went through the state Cabinet and that he should not be the one to answer for it.
Anyway as a result of this sale, Desa Cattle’s land bank in Keningau and Kundasang shrunk to a measly thousand acres.
Kim Loong the West Malaysian group, made huge profits from the land over the years by converting it to oil palm cultivation.
Because of this silly decision, Sabah is now no longer self-sufficient in beef, mutton and buffalo meat production. These days the state imports frozen beef from Australia and New Zealand, and buffalo meat from India.
This controversial deal between KPD Holdings, the state government and the Desa Cattle management group calls for declassifying the documents on these deals that lead to massive losses.
Losses, which incidentally is far greater than the ongoing case of National Feedlot Corporation (NFC), another “lembu” business.
Auditor-General’s report for 2011 reported a gross mismanagement of the NFC project worth RM250 million which involved the family of former Women, Family and Community Development Minister Shahrizat Abdul Jalil.
