The untold story of Malaysia’s ‘bankruptcy’

(LSS) – Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad just said that Malaysia “will not slide into bankruptcy* as there are “huge savings” from several government institutions, notably the Employees Provident Fund (EPF), which can be used to help the economy recover in the event of crisis.

“I don’t think under this government, the country will slide into bankruptcy,” he said in a news conference broadcast live from Tokyo, Japan where he is attending the Future of Asia conference hosted by Nikkei. Dr Mahathir was replying a question on whether Malaysia might slip into a financial crisis over the RM1 trillion debt and liabilities.

It is true that the official govt debt is RM681 billion now, which is RM380 billion more than the RM300 billion debt in 2008 before the Najib govt came into power.

But what Tun M forgot to tell you is that the wealth or assets of Khazanah, BNM and Petronas alone has increased by RM400 billion between 2008 to end 2017 – more than the govt debt increase.

Between 2008 to 2017:
– BNM’s net reserves (not counting FOREX) increased from RM31.7b to RM136.8b.
– Petronas net assets doubled from RM223.4b to RM432.4b. More significantly, Petronas now has CASH of RM164.7b which is many times more compared to before.
– Khazanah Net Worth increased from RM31.7b to RM136.8b.

BNM, Khazanah and Petronas are all 100% owned by the govt so the govt can take their money ANYTIME to pay off national debt if they want. These are just three assets – not even counting the other assets and funds owned by the govt.

To make things even more interesting, the wealth of the people increased even more.

Between 2008 to 2017, PNB’s funds more than doubled from RM120b to RM280b while EPF’s funds grew from RM340b to RM815b.

Meaning the wealth of the people in these two funds alone grew almost RM700b – from RM400b to RM1,095b

Essentially, Tun M just admitted today that Malaysia was never in any danger of going bankrupt and it was just lies before GE14, which will also serve as a good excuse not to implement their unrealistic Manifesto promises after GE14.

However, let’s just hope that this new Tun M govt will not raid EPF for bail-outs again just like how he did so with the MAMINCO tin scandal and the BNM Forex scandal.