How can we best describe a business or investment entity that buys some 70 acres of prime land at below RM100 per square foot and then resells it within four years to a body corporate that is a trustee for public (religious) funds at a sweet song of over RM2,000 per square foot?
Business marvel? Brilliant accomplishment? Or is it bordering on ugly profiteering and scheming?
We seem to be losing all our ethical bearings these days. When a retailer hikes his ‘bawang’ and ‘halia’ by a few cents a kilo to make RM30 extra earnings for the day, the government’s enforcement arm will swing into action and the news makes headlines in the muzzled mainstream media the next day.
And we hail the Umno-government as the people’s protector.
But what about 1MDB? Here is a state investment Board that gets a santa’s gift – prime and prestigious 70 acres of development land for RM194.1 million and within four years enticed a gullible public trustee fund management organisation with religious flavour to grab a mere one-and-half acres for a whooping RM188.5 million.
Is this what the prime minister and Finance Minister Datuk Seri Najib meant by his “endless possibilities” promises?
Tun Dr Mahathir must be right after all in stating that it is a “bailout”. If confirmed to be a yes, then the entire country has every reason to worry and lose sleep. Here is a classic example of the proverb, ‘to rob from Peter to pay Paul’. We are robbing from the citizens ultimately to pay for the mistakes of (or maybe looting by) a few people in power.
If 1MDB had made the sale to some dumb private investor we could probably say, “serves the gullible greedy fool a good lesson”. But here is a case of a trustee organisation deliberately designed and set up to safeguard and fulfill a very sacred aspect of its Muslim members, i.e. to enable the ordinary rakyat to be able to go to Mecca.
And to get Tabung Haji’s property investment arm to pay such a sinfully high price and then get them to justify the action by stating that 1MDB even gave them a decent discount on the going “market value” is like committing two sins to cover one sin really.
And on top of that, we now have even the guardian of citizens’ safety and security, the police, threatening to take action on the whistleblower under the Official Secrets Act on this mother-of-all exposes.
Maybe it is too late even for the other Umno leaders and members to make a slow U-turn by now making statements and demands for investigations. These were the same people who pleaded to give Najib a chance to prove himself.
Well, if by some maverick stroke of genius – if that is what you want to call it, Najib sells off the balance of 65-over acres at even more sinfully inflated price tags, the money 1MDB would have made as a killing is not a celebration.
It smacks of unethical conduct. Buying something dirt cheap from the government and allowing the same government to let you make a killing is not right, even less so if that ill-gotten cash was also used to service bad debts and finance some dubious individuals.
Further, even the new buyer will now sink that cost into his development with the end consumer becoming the victim.
Does Najib not realize that there is no shortcut to making the government rich?
Indeed, not only has Umno lost its credibility because of 1MDB, we now appear to be saying to the global community of ethical investors that Malaysia does not play by the rules.
J.D. Lovrenciear is an FMT reader
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