Mahathir gostarn-ing on ECRL?
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As I had written in an earlier post, Mahathir did NOT succeed in his attempts to persuade Chinese leaders to accept him withdrawing from projects contracted with China without any penalties.At most, China might have allowed a longer period for Malaysia to settle the compensations. They might have offered Mahathir ‘tea & sympathy’ but probably ended up saying, “Business is business, we cannot interfere with the companies who signed those contracts with Malaysia”.
I gather that unfavourable outcome for Mahathir after reading the Hong Kong English daily, the Southern China Morning Post, which tells a different story from what Malaysian press reported, that Mahathir did succeed in his reach-out to China and that Chinese leaders understood him.
“If we have to pay compensation, we have to pay. This is the stupidity of the negotiations before. We must find a way to exit these projects … this is our own people’s stupidity.”
He has blamed Najib’s “stupidity” for not having an exit clause to the projects’ contracts, but Najib came back with a challenge which Mahathir has yet to respond to, namely, to hold a RCI on the project contracts and exit clauses, which Najib assured us do exist.
