Companies in Pakatan states are throwing in their towels
The Third Force
TTF: Businesses in Penang and Selangor regret having supported the opposition during the 2013 general election. Read between the lines, and you will see that the formal apology extended yesterday by the Group Managing Director of Supermax Corp Bhd (see news item below) is really a sign that companies in Selangor are facing very bad times.
And it’s no different in Penang.
In the fourth quarter of 2015 alone, nine corporate giants in the state were either talking shutdowns or relocations to other states. The companies involved were Motorola, Western Digital, Blaupunkt, HGST, Amphenol TCS, EMC, UTi, Ericsson and AMD. But if you were to have asked Lim Guan Eng, he would have told you that things were fine. To deliver that impression, he got his team to quietly tuck away portions of development expenditure into the State Finance Department’s Trust Fund.
That explains how Penang registered a cumulative RM574 budget surplus between the years 2008 and 2015. In 2016, the state utilised only 67.6 percent of the RM346.12 million – or RM233.98 million – allotted for development but made it look as if it spent RM307.45 million for the purpose. A remaining RM73.61 million was quietly tucked away into a Trust Fund and marked in the books as “State Revenue.”
By performing such acrobatics, Guan Eng gives the impression that the state’s coffers are brimming with investments owing to the state’s Competency, Accountability and Transparency (CAT) policy. Ask him, and he’ll tell you tales of Chinese construction firms that are willing to pump millions into state-linked entities. On the 4th of April 2013, the state-run Buletin Mutiara told one such tale when it fraudulently announced that China Railway Construction Corporation Limited (CRCC) held stakes in a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) awarded the RM6.3 billion Penang Undersea Tunnel project.
And where is CRCC now?
