Mahathir, the man behind the Chinese Tsunami (part 1 of 2)

Najib may have been a Pak Lah loyalist who accidentally became the Prime Minister. But by the time Mahathir realised his ‘folly’ in 2009, it was too late to do anything other than to put on a fake smile on his face and hatch a plot to remove Najib

The Third Force

Dato’ Seri Najib Tun Razak succeeded Tun Abdullah Haji Ahmad Badawi as Malaysia’s sixth Prime Minister with a tacit strategy – to build the dream economy his late father had once imagined. That strategy, later unveiled as a reform blueprint, found expression in policies that showed promise of significant growth for the economy.

More than that, it appeared to cater to a middle ground not only for black and white voters (terms that are typically used to identify voters based on their balloting bias), but also for left-leaning and right-leaning politicians. The New Economic Model (NEM), as it was called, favoured progressive partnership over partisanship in the spirit of fair-play and demanded that the market be more open and less manipulated by the state.

The model was really the echo of a voice from the past – a voice that had once taken a conciliatory position against racial polarisation and poverty. It was the voice of Tun Abdul Razak, whose New Economic Policy (NEP) was branded the solution for many of Malaysia’s divisive ills and was geared to put an end to race-identification by economic function.

But the philanthropic lure of the NEP dissipated with time. A decade after its launch, the policy found new patronage in corporatist politicians who favoured the reverse – partisanship over partnership. It triggered the killer instinct in select personalities who, with the help of Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohammad and, later, Tun Daim Zainuddin, abused the NEP with backdoor deals that sometimes trumped the better deserving competitor.

Both Mahathir and Daim were the direct beneficiaries of a bureaucratic apparatus they hijacked that made billionaires out of millionaires. And this is the story of some of these billionaires and how they knowingly, and in some cases, unknowingly inspired the 2013 Chinese Tsunami.

“Mahathir had begun instigating the Chinese even before he resigned as Prime minister. On the 29th of September 2001, he had Chinese delegates sitting with their jaws dropped during a Gerakan event as he declared Malaysia to be an Islamic State. Mahathir later told reporters that non-Muslims had the right to regard Malaysia as a Secular State. And that is how he inveigled a free pass to the Islamic State concept from the Chinese without having them run around his podium like demented Mafia’s on ecstasy. But the seeds of a new sort of dissent had been planted, nonetheless…”

How it all started

Najib’s inauguration back in 2009 seemed to put a smile on Mahathir’s face. The general perception to this day is that the former premier had been waiting a very long time for Najib to succeed Abdullah, or better yet known as Pak Lah. But that couldn’t have been any further from the truth.

“Najib may have been a Pak Lah loyalist who accidentally became the Prime Minister. But by the time Mahathir realised his ‘folly’ in 2009, it was too late to do anything other than to put on a fake smile on his face and hatch a plot to remove Najib”

The truth concerned two incidents that took place before Najib was sworn in as Prime Minister. The first is a secret I swore to a friend to keep and as such, will follow me to my grave. Yet, you can rest assured that it wasn’t the final straw that drove Malaysia’s fourth Prime Minister against Najib.

No. The final straw came in 2008 when Najib, being Abdullah’s deputy, displayed a strand of moral fibre Mahathir found impossible to relish. Standing by his principles, Najib chose to ignore calls by his late father’s protégé, who wanted him to pressure the Prime Minister into retirement by cunning and forced cause.

In short, Najib refused to be on Mahathir’s leash.

What infuriated Mahathir the most was the ‘betrayal’ (discussed further in part 2). To Mahathir, Najib had remained loyal to Abdullah despite knowing that the latter had ‘sabotaged’ what seemed remarkably like ‘a rationalisation’ plan that may have began as early as 1985.

“Raja Petra Kamarudin has spoken of a secret deal that involved Mahathir, Daim and Tan Sri Vincent Tan in his recent publications. If it’s one thing that nobody suspected, it is that the Vincent Empire was likely the progeny of a very twisted and elaborate backdoor conspiracy. And guess what…the plot is about to get a whole lot thicker than you can ever imagine”

The ‘rationalisation’ plan, noble as it seemed, was for the government to relinquish its stakes in activity that threatened to shift the Malay ballot in favour of PAS. By 1986, Mahathir had issued a directive that required all ministers to divest their corporate holdings. The efforts bore fruit during the 1995 general elections, when Islamic fundamentalists from both corners of the political dogmatic arena were convinced that Mahathir was not quite the anti-Islamist they had painted him out to be since the early nineties.

But little did anyone suspect that Mahathir had a hidden agenda every step of the way.

The Bailout Conspiracy

Since May 1985, both Mahathir and Daim engaged in a three year labyrinth of negotiations, favours and share-swaps that consummated with a landmark acquisition, the equivalent of a bailout exercise.

In June 1988, Raleigh Berhad – Daim’s onetime flagship enterprise –relinquished a lion’s share of its equity to an investment concern of Tan Sri Vincent Tan, B&B Enterprise. The acquisition was negotiated through a share-swap that gave Raleigh huge control over Berjaya Corporation Berhad, a company that owned a sizeable stake of Vincent’s gaming interest, Sports Toto Berhad.

A public listed entity, Raleigh, which was later renamed Inter-Pacific Industrial Group, was brought into the picture at the eleventh hour in what began as a ‘rationalisation’ plan. But the plan turned into a bailout following the 1997 UMNO and 1998 constitutional crises that shook Mahathir’s faith in the party’s traditional electoral apparatus and many of his comrades.

“With Mahathir’s faith in the traditional electoral apparatus and his comrades shaken, Raleigh Berhad popped into the scene. The company was Daim’s onetime flagship that he had consigned to his associates in trust following a directive by Mahathir in 1986 for all Ministers to divest their corporate holdings. The company was said to be operating on a ledger deficit”

Having swallowed a bitter pill, Mahathir decided that Sports Toto was a betting cash-cow he needed on his turf, on his terms. The Machiavellian politician realised that he needed an emissary he could trust to pull off a proxy scheme that would bankroll the party’s war chest in the future.

Not only did Daim fit into the picture perfectly, he was beholden to his associates, who were running a company that was said to be operating on a ledger deficit. Together with Daim, and some say Vincent, Mahathir drafted a proposition that I like to call the Sweep Stake.

Apart from bailing Raleigh Berhad out, the Sweep Stake gave Vincent greater control of Sports Toto Berhad – a company that was incorporated by the government in 1969 – under terms of a verbal covenant that is said to have committed the Johor born Chinese tycoon to a proxy scheme. It is believed that Inter-Pacific undertook to commit a certain percentage of its treasury to the party’s electoral cause.

Be that as it may, we now have a clear picture how and why Raleigh crept into the scene.

The 1989-1995 ‘rationalisation’ conspiracy

The controversial ‘Raleigh bailout’ seemed more a vintage Daim affair. It is said that the deal rescued some of Daim’s closest associates, who were holding the ailing company’s equity in trust for the then Finance Minister, from the jaws of a possible bankruptcy.

But the acquisition seemed to bear the brunt of a conspiracy. Soon, tongues began to wag as to what prompted a man, esteemed by the Chinese to be a strategist extraordinaire, to acquire a white elephant which party insiders believed was more than a failed venture – it was on the verge of a collapse.

Little did people realise that the lure was yet another elephant that was parked in the room in a hush-hush manner. A month prior to the acquisition, the government sold its remaining 30% stake in Sports Toto Berhad to Inter-Pacific (then Raleigh Berhad), a move that gave Vincent substantial control of Sports Toto by 1994.

To put it another way, the move made a hell of a billionaire out of Vincent, and over the years, Daim. But the ‘rationalisation’ was about to be ‘re-rationalised’.

In January 1989, Berjaya Corporation – which Vincent had swapped his shares in for a controlling stake in Inter-Pacific – raised its share in the gaming affair to almost 90%. In a mangle of ‘rationalisation’ exercises, and by December 1989, Berjaya Corporation registered a 93.25% stake in Sports Toto, which strapped Vincent firmly in the driver’s seat of the gaming enterprise via his investment concern, B&B Enterprise.

“By 1994, the name Vincent Tan was said to have been synonymous to the Malaysian gaming scene, where some knew him as the ‘sports betting towkay’. As a matter of fact, I’ve even heard some call him the ‘betting Mafia chief’. Well, anyone can call anyone anything these days, and you really can’t be sure who’s telling the truth and who’s not. But one thing is for sure…Vincent was to Sports Toto by then what a puppet-master was to his puppets”

What transpired in the intermediate years and thereafter in 1995 was articulated in an article Malaysia Today carried on the 6th of January 2016 (refer http://wwww.malaysia-today.net/about-najib-selling-the-country-to-the -chinese/). By the time Mahathir was ready to call it a day in office, he had ‘consigned’ the full scope of Sports Toto’s business and operations to Vincent, who in turn, was made beholden to the former’s post-ministerial whims.

To be continued…