Vincent Tan, Mahathir, and the NEP: Privatisation of Sports Toto
August 16, 2010
Vincent Tan, NEP and the Privatisation of Sports Toto
by Ahmad Mustapha Hassan*
The Visionary or the Maverick
I read with great interest Dato Zaid Ibrahim’s article today on the NEP and the Chinese . As he makes a reference to me I need to provide some details and my relationship with Vincent Tan and how people like Vincent Tan had made use of people , especially Malays like me.
I am still seething with anger and hurt by the way Vincent Tan had treated me. I played a pivotal role in the privatisation of Sports Toto and Vincent went on to make billions while leaving me out in the cold. That is NEP for you.
Zaid made an indirect reference to my role. He said: “So he (Mahathir) privatised Sports Toto….. to Vincent. But to be successful, Vincent had to have a Mahathir relative as his “partner”. Vincent asked a nice gentleman, Mahathir’s nephew, who headed the national news agency Bernama then, to be his partner, with Mahathir’s blessings. But I doubt this nice guy got much in the end as Malay partners don’t last very long in this high stakes game. The rest is history. Vincent built his fortunes on these “haram” activities. An NEP success story, certainly.”
Let me put it the way it happened. It is more than three years since I officially disclosed what is being owed to me by tycoons T. Ananda Krishnan and Vincent Tan in my book “The Unmaking of Malaysia.” The book was for a time a best seller and the intention of my writing the book was to expose how these two billionaires got a head start in business and how I had been instrumental in helping them in some of their initial ventures.
The book had categorically mentioned that these men had made use of my services but had reneged on the terms of payment for my services. These were services that one would have thought impossible to deliver but I made it possible in view of my knowledge, administrative expertise and connections.
I have attempted for years to recover what has been owed to me by Ananda Krishnan and Vincent Tan. Ananda owed me for my services in getting him control of Inchcape Malaysia and Vincent Tan in the privatization of Sports Toto.
I have sent countless letters, e-mails and also used the services of debt collectors. I have also sought the
The Maverick and Friends
services of eminent personalities who are close to these two businessmen. I had also repeatedly tried to meet them but it was unfortunate that I was unable to have a face to face meeting with them and plain and simple they had refused to see me.
They know that they owe me for what I had done for them and that is the reason why they have not taken me to court to answer the charges that I had levelled against them, especially in my book. The stark and plain details are clearly stated in it. Vincent Tan had the books removed from the shelves of Borders which he operates in Malaysia when he learnt that the international book chain had stocks of it.
I also met up with friends who were involved in the privatization of Sports Toto, especially Ahmad Sebi, a former influential editor and close confidant of former finance minister Tun Daim Zainuddin and also Vincent Tan. Ahmad Sebi and he wondered why Vincent Tan had not offered me a listed company like how he had taken care of him for the services he rendered. I thought then that Vincent Tan would rather offer me what he had promised about the shares in Sports Toto rather than handing me a listed company that he had no more interest in.
I also believed that he was deferring the transfer of the shares to me until Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad had relinquished the post of Prime Minister and I was prepared to wait patiently for that day.
Dato Ahmad Mustapha, author of The Unmaking of Malaysia
I based this belief on what he told me at our meeting at the then Ming Court Hotel, where he said that we should not embarrass Dr Mahathir by appointing me as a Director of Sports Toto. He asked me instead to name a proxy as a director. I chose a close buddy and a virtual unknown Shuib Yaacob, who was then appointed as a director of Sports Toto.
But after the retirement of Dr Mahathir, Vincent simply kept mum on his promise of allotting 15% of the shares of Sports Toto to me. This promise was made when we had the discussion at Ming Court Hotel.
I had at some point before when I was the Chairman of South Pacific Textile (later renamed Berjaya Textiles) informed Dr Mahathir about some unethical business practices of Vincent. One such practice was to rescind Board decisions that displeased him. He did this by calling emergency board meetings and had resolutions approved the way he wanted them.
Thus he felt that my action in revealing this kind of unethical business practices would harm his cordial relationship with Dr Mahathir. He, in fact, demanded that I should absolve him and not report his bad practices so that his relationship with Dr Mahathir would not be affected.
He was also angry that I related in my book the sequence, details and the personalities involved in the quest to privatize Sports Toto to him. It was a gigantic task, something thought impossible at that time but I made that possible
He has forgotten the time when he kept disturbing me in the middle of the night about the urgency in this privatization exercise. He had always called me at unearthly hours to discuss matters with him at the Raintree Club. He also forgot that it was I who told him to follow me to Rome to meet Dr Mahathir to sound out the prospect of having Sports Toto privatized.
He also seems to have forgotten the advice that I gave concerning the content of the proposal for this privatization. “In no way must there be mention of gain in this exercise. The gain should only be on the side of the government.”
He also seems to have forgotten the reason why I told him to rope in Ahmad Sebi. Ahmad Sebi was very close to Daim Zainuddin who was then the Minister of Finance. It would be Daim who would recommend to the Prime Minister as to who should get Sports Toto.
I might not have been involved in the nuts and bolts of preparing the proposal but I was the ideas man and initiator in this project. I first thought of it and actively canvassed for it to be privatized. Without my initial input Sports Toto would not have gone Vincent’s way. How he has forgotten this and how he has gone on to renege on his promise to allocate 15% of the shares of Sports Toto to me. I have vigorously pursued what rightly belongs to me and I will not rest till justice is done and the promised shares are allotted to me. It was a gentleman’s agreement and I had then thought Vincent was a man of his word although many had forewarned me to have everything in black and white and in proper legal terms.
It is always the case, as many have since pointed out. I was indispensable and highly needed and appreciated during the early stages of the proposal but when it came to the final and closing stages and once it was locked in , I was left to drift and had to beg and plead for what was promised and am still pleading that it be honoured. Vincent and I had worked on this privatisation proposal day and night to ensure that this was the the only proposal acceptable by the Government. Unfortunately, when the privatisation proposal was accepted by the government those runners responsible for the ultimate decision became his blue-eyed boys and given the perks. I was completely left out but I held onto the belief that he would fulfill his promise once Dr Mahathir had stepped down from office. But he felt that he could conveniently push me aside without having to honour his words.
But that will not be and so long as I have some iota of energy I will fight for what I believe is a just cause . I am still waging what I term as a fight to ensure that I am given what is rightly due to me.
Many have said that Vincent has no conscience .It is the fasting month and I am bringing out this matter afresh hoping that Vincent, for all his wealth and the head start he had as a result of the Sport Toto licence, will honour his pledge to me and settle the sums due to me.
Until then I will not rest and I will resort to other more drastic measures to let the world know how I have been shortchanged.–www.themalaysianinsider
*Dato Ahmad Mustapha Hassan is the author of The Unmaking of Malaysia. The book is about Mahathirian economics at work.
From the late British intellectual Tony Judt:
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/5986/a_new_day_for_the_new_deal/
A New Day for the New Deal?
Tony Judt diagnoses America’s decline.
By Melvyn Dubofsky (May 16, 2010)
Does anyone still read Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom, a staple of my undergraduate education, or John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society, a staple of my early years teaching undergraduates modern U.S. history? Or are they relics of my depression-era cohort, the farthest thing from the minds of today’s young people to whom Tony Judt directs Ill Fares the Land (Penguin), his jeremiad about the state of contemporary Anglo-American societies?
I ask those questions because reading Judt’s succinct book harkened back to ideas that I first encountered reading Fromm’s and Galbraith’s erudite yet clearly written indictments of the conventional wisdom as pronounced by advocates of the free market and the minimal state.
Judt, one of our most distinguished historians of modern Europe, like Fromm and Galbraith, was born and bred outside the United States. Unlike the latter two who lived long and healthy lives, Judt is a victim of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease), an untreatable and fatal illness. His ongoing physical deterioration has rendered him unable to write and type, yet it has seemed to sharpen his mind and prose, as anyone who has read his recent essays in the New York Review of Books has discovered.
Like Fromm and Galbraith, Judt disdains a society in which wealth alone is the measure of a person, individualism reigns supreme and the policemen’s baton represents the state’s primary purpose. Like Fromm but unlike Galbraith, Judt knows his Marx, de Tocqueville, Edmund Burke and the real Adam Smith, a philosopher of moral sentiments as well as an imaginary marketplace.
He writes from an unabashedly social democratic perspective, one that might be defined as conservative, for Judt lauds the policies and programs favored by social democrats that made the years from 1945 to 1973 the most secure, prosperous, and egalitarian in the history of Western nations.
His social democrats encompass an array of politicians and thinkers from Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, the British, New Zealand, and Australian Labour parties, the Scandinavian and Continental European social democrats, and economist John Maynard Keynes.
“Social Democracy,” he writes, “does not represent an ideal future; it does not even represent the ideal past. But among the options available to us today, it is better than anything else to hand.”
For Judt, social democracy implies cultural and religious tolerance, space for vigorous ideological and political dissent and room for individual idiosyncrasy. Unlike liberals, however, social democrats believe in collective action for the common good; they support progressive taxation to finance public services and social goods that most individuals cannot provide for themselves as a function of a good society rather than as a necessary evil.
Like Galbraith, Judt insists that a society that allows public squalor to coexist alongside private affluence is one in which the state fails its citizens. Like Fromm, he believes a society that condemns too many of its members to lives of material insecurity is one in which the masses will flee from freedom into the embrace of Fascist or Nazi leaders who promise them security in return for obedience.
That was why in Europe after World War II, those in political power sought to create public programs that guaranteed all citizens a secure and comfortable material existence, and avoid the mistakes of the interwar years that led to the rise of Mussolini and Hitler. That was why in the 1930s European social democrats admired the New Deal and Roosevelt’s public works programs that built state parks, irrigated much of the arid west, electrified the Tennessee Valley, subsidized construction of colleges and universities, and provided employment for writers, artists and performers. That is also why the Kennedy and Johnson administrations should be admired for expanding the New Deal welfare state and establishing the National Endowments for Humanities and the Arts.
Judt is not a naïve admirer of state power. He remains quite aware of the evils that states may inflict and their tendency to abuse the power of surveillance. Yet he insists that there are many beneficial services that only the state and collective action can provide. He devotes an entire chapter to proving that mass transit can only be properly maintained through public operation and subsidies.
Judt stresses that when the state is the problem rather than the answer (Reagan) and when there is no society, only individuals and families (Thatcher), inequality flourishes, security vanishes and for masses of citizens life chances narrow. He pulls no punches in asserting that the policies implemented by Reagan and Thatcher, policies based on the ideas of the émigré Austrian economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek (and promoted by the Chicago “boys,” most notably Milton Friedman), made the United States and Great Britain the two most unequal societies, the two economies most dominated by an unregulated financial sector, and the two nations with the most dilapidated public sector in the advanced world. Judt indicts the Anglo-American exponents of rational unregulated markets—whose epigones in finance ran wild—for causing the economic collapse of 2008 and nearly bringing on a second global Great Depression.
Where Judt may go astray in explaining the triumph of free-market, neoclassical economics is in a brief chapter that castigates the student rebels and “new leftists” of the 1960s for precipitating the rise of a powerful counter-movement that took power and repudiated the legacy of social democracy. I share Judt’s belief that the 1960s youthful rebels, as beneficiaries of the social security state built by social democrats, took their security for granted and failed to appreciate the accomplishments of their parents’ generation.
I understand Judt’s disdain for the individualism that underlay such banal sentiments as “do your own thing” or “the personal is political,” beliefs that led to a preference for “identity politics” rather than collective action that cuts across lines of ethnicity, race and gender. But the student rebels and leftists were not responsible for the economic contraction, the raging inflation and the soaring interest rates (stagflation) that bedeviled Western economies after 1973.
It was “stagflation,” partly a result of policies pursued by Judt’s social democratic Keynesians and partly a result of temporary oil shortages—not hippies, yippies, druggies and Weatherpeople—that caused state fiscal crises, generated antipathy to public expenditures and resistance to progressive taxes and brought to political power the free-market exponents of deregulation, privatization and reduced taxation.
For nearly 30 years the advocates of the free market and privatization held sway, causing the most recent catastrophe in a long history of capitalist crises and leading Judt to ask, as Lenin inquired a century ago, “What is to be done?” For Judt the answer is for the social democratic left to write a new narrative that extols the virtue of collective state action for the public good, action that diminishes inequality and restores security to the neglected. And to do so, bearing in mind, as Edmund Burke wrote, that society is “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead and those who are to be born.”
In his final sentence, Judt reminds us of Marx’s epigrammatic thesis: “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world … the point is to change it.”
Phua Kai Lit - August 16, 2010 at 1:07 pm
Recall Mid-Term Review of 2nd Malaysian Plan (1970-1975) on the NEP. The NEP had the stated goal of poverty eradication and economic restructuring so as to eliminate the identification of ethnicity with economic function. The overall objective was to promote national unity.
It is not crony capitalism which is the foundation of Mahathirism or Mahathirian economics. Therefore, the privatisation deals like those given to Vincent Tan and Ananda Krishnan have nothing to do with NEP. In trying to create a Bumiputra Commercial and Industrial Community, Mahathir overlooked the rapacious nature of capitalism, that is, capitalists are creators and accumulators of wealth. Greed is good (Gordon Gecko’s credo). The likes of Halim Saad, Tajuddin Ramli and other favored Malays were capitalists, not distributors of wealth.
That is why I agree with Nazir Razak that we have deviated to the NEP’s original purpose and now we need to change our affirmative action policy so that it can serve as the means to achieve national unity.–Din Merican
dinobeano - August 16, 2010 at 1:08 pm
I am confused! This writer says that this “Vincent” owes him 15% shares in Toto, which he considers ‘haram’? How does this pan out? How does he define ‘Conscience’? I have no idea about what ‘Berjaya’ means, but I can recognize a serpent amongst rocks(batu). The only real Vincent I heard off was a suicidal maniac:
Menyalak-er - August 16, 2010 at 1:15 pm
This is a case of hantu lawan hantu. I say we grab ringside seats and watch the fight. Let these crooks fight amongst themselves.
JJx - August 16, 2010 at 1:25 pm
“Like Galbraith, Judt insists that a society that allows public squalor to coexist alongside private affluence is one in which the state fails its citizens. Like Fromm, he believes a society that condemns too many of its members to lives of material insecurity is one in which the masses will flee from freedom into the embrace of Fascist or Nazi leaders who promise them security in return for obedience.”
Din, than I ask (with grave concern) that if things do not change what will happen in Malaysia becasue as i see it the State has failed its people??
Kathy - August 16, 2010 at 1:37 pm
Who says you cannot receive God’s punishments on earth? This is a full-blown example of it. People professing to be Muslims invoking the Holy Month, cry injustice for not getting their share of the haram loot.
Note all the Muslim names in the show, from the great Tuns, to their beloved lieutenants to the trusted proxies. I heard a lot of buka puasa sessions at the RM200 a seat buffets are sponsored by the likes of Vincent; while the cream of Malaysian Muslim society gorge at the trough relishing the rezeki from above.
Anyway, as they say, there is no honor among thieves. And the bolehland lot take the cake. So Dato’ what are you whining about?
Mr Bojangles - August 16, 2010 at 1:51 pm
sori lah En Ahmad M H…when you wanna swim with the sharks, you must come prep with chain-mail armour. Else you are just another simple blur sotong ali baba from the ulukampong, with whom the likes of vince ananda regular eat for breakfast!
These behind the scene deals are shady to say the least. You are a sour grapoe as you didnt get your dues…Your Uncle got his and thats why these corporate sharks can ignore the like like you.
By the way, NEP is not about pulling strings with the PM (especially uncle, father and what have you) or the finance minister about usually ‘shady ‘deals benefiting only the few, at the expense of the majority.
Sorry old chap, no sympathy from me.
P/s if any1 wanna be doing business and prosper the halal way…best find a decent, hard working, honest bizzman like me! hahahahah!
hurricaneMax - August 16, 2010 at 1:53 pm
What the writer did was Haram – siphoning the rakyat’s money.
It’s like Ali Baba and the 40 thieves.
This is not an honest way of doing business.
Lawyer - August 16, 2010 at 2:04 pm
Too bad, buddy…. two wrongs don’t make one right. Scheming to take Sports Toto away by showing it benefit the government and the people which is blatant and outright cheating. So, like HurricaneMax above said, tried swimming with the sharks, and you get eaten for breakfast? No sympathy from me too. But I hope you fight all the way for what you think is yours… at least we Malaysians see at least one of two thieves get mauled and killed… better still if both also destroyed in the fight… thats justice for Malaysians!!!
Sentinel - August 16, 2010 at 2:14 pm
Mad,
Kesian kat hang no. Nak pakat dengan Tan buat business, tapi kena kencing.
Tu lah hang ingat nak kelentong rakyat kononnya sport toto untuk kemajuan sukan. Silap kira hang yang kena kelentong.
Pi la jumpa Pak Menakan hang tu. Buat muka kesian sikit. Kalau dak pun hang pi lah jumpa anak-anak dia yang dah jadi billionaires semua la ni.
Awat dok mai tulis bagi orang gelak kat hang sja. Orang kata hang ni dah lah kena tipu, kena kutuk dengan orang pula tu.
Aku rasa hang pi cari lawyer anak raja kedah yang la ni dok di Amerika.
Nama dia Bean atau Mongkut.
tean - August 16, 2010 at 3:08 pm
Hi Uncle Mat
I really feel sad for you. I remember when we were in The Hague my dad introduced us to you saying that you are meeting the man who will made it big in Malaysia.
I remember dad’s cousin who studied in University of Singapore with you telling us that you have one of the best brains.
Yep, you went on to become Press Secretary and speech writer to Tun Razak.The last we heard of you were when you were Bernama GM.
And our last meeting was at your childr’s wedding in Ukay Heights, more than 20 years ago.
I hope you and Aunty Normah are keeping well, healthwise.
Datuk Mat Mustapha is a fine example of Malays being cheated by Indian and Chinese businessmen. Being made used of and disposed of, after they got what they wanted.
But I just wonder why Mat Sebi can thrive and not being manipulated. Brain wise, he’s lesser than Mat Mustapha.
I think it’s because he’s manipulative too.
Mat Sebi was one of Malaysia’s richest man under the aegis of Daim. Also thrived in Halim Saad’s company.
Is it because he’s close to Daim? So the business partners are scared of him..
Uncle Mat is a nephew of Tun M. But I think Vincent and Ananda knew there’s a love-hate relationship between uncle and nephew..
Uncle Mat is also by-passed at least twice to become MP by his own uncle.
Other lesser men have been MPs and moved on to be ministers.
We lost a good brain in Uncle Mat.
You must sue those two for all they are worth.
Dont leave it too late since you are now 77, if my math is right.
I am sure lawyers who read this will be wiling to take up your case.
Sayang bangsa - August 16, 2010 at 4:25 pm
Ai yo at 77 you are still thinking of the haram shares in Berjaya Toto, shoulding you be making your peace with Allah in preparation of meeting him in the not too distant future ?.
observer - August 16, 2010 at 4:39 pm
“Aku rasa hang pi cari lawyer anak raja kedah yang la ni dok di Amerika. Nama dia Bean atau Mongkut” tean
Hang ni Mat, kena tipu dah berapa kali? Sa bodoh bodoh orhang kampong pun tak lah macam ni. Dah lah jatoh tangga, kena pijak pulak. Hang ni serik la sikit. Hang dok main dengan penyangak Vincent Tan tu buat apa. Dulu dia hanya juai insuran. Hang ingat dia kaya sebab juai insuran ka??
La ni, tulih buku pulak! Buat apa nak malu diri sendirhi. Orang baca dok gelak kat hang. Tu kan bodoh nama nya. Nanti dia pakai kawan lama saya VK Lingam macam mana? Hakim pun dah semua masok poket depa. Kan bodoh nama nya.
Gini lah. Lebeh baik hang guna hari tua hang pi enjoy. Kalau tak tau macam mana nak enjoy pi jumpa sami tean. Biaq dia bawak hang pi Haadyai. Yang hang dok buang masa, tulih sini tulih sana, buat buku pulak tu, buat apaa? Buat malu dirhi sendirhi saja. Serhik la sikit.
Mr Bean - August 16, 2010 at 5:43 pm
Lebih baik hang, Mat, tulih satu lagi buku dan bagi nama “Swimming with the sharks: cost and benefit” Ada chan naik ka New York best seller list.
Mr Bean - August 16, 2010 at 6:34 pm
I am sure you are well aware that your uncle Mahathir is big time in the PROXY game with tycoons like Ananda, Vincent Tan,Francis Yeoh, and Mahathirs personal favourite Aramugam of GE fame (properties in Argentina). BJ Toto is too big to be handed to you as probabally it has been proxied for the 3 sons and 1 daughter ( 4 M’s)
walter - August 16, 2010 at 7:02 pm
tell me which lawyer or in this case, a loyar is bodoh blur sotong enuff to go sue the likes of vince anaconda, over ‘alleged promisory word’ of GodZillion$$hare$?
get real lah. HAHAHAH! the sharks already paid off its handlers and masters and even the proxies!…
Oh, the more I read, the more I kesian En Mat…he is a brilliant man so it seems..but then brilliant mind doesnt make one a brilliantly shrewd businessman. Sir do you know that even yr uncle has abandoned you? …anyway, if its any consolation, even the brilliant Vincent Van Gogh died broke! And you know his 1st painting was bought by his bro-inlaw…after countless nagging from his sis? hahahah!
hurricaneMax - August 16, 2010 at 8:13 pm
“Swimming with the sharks: cost and benefit” ?
Lagi sedap kalau tukaq dalam bahasa ibunda.
” Bagaimana seluar aku terlondeh, kerana cuba berenang dengan jerung belaan ayahanda”.
tean - August 16, 2010 at 9:07 pm
Mr Bean
Seronok denghak hang cakap loghat pekat Kedah. Lucu sakan.
Memangpun lagu tu Uncle Mat cakap.
Hangpa tolonglah anak senegheri hang tu. Baliklah kat Malaysia kejap no tolong jadi loyar dia.
Pro Bono pun takpa? Bulih?
Nanti nama hang naek melambung tolong anak kemanakan Che Det.
Sayang bangsa - August 16, 2010 at 9:34 pm
I’m sorry guys! My knowledge of bahasa has stagnated at the stage of ‘kemaluan saya sangat besaq’.
Mr Bean - August 16, 2010 at 9:51 pm
“cheated by Mamak Kutty (Indian) and Chinese businessmen. Being made used of and disposed of, after they got what they wanted”
As the old Malaysian saying goes, when you see the 1st businessman and a cobra.kill the businessman first. And of the 2nd businessman, the only thing straight about him is his hair.
My advice to the good Datuk,get a good lawyer and take them to the cleaners for all that you have lost and even more.
Note to brother Din, I will quite understand if this does see the light of the screen, but this was to good an opportunity to be missed.
Brian - August 16, 2010 at 9:58 pm
Bean, I thought this is a satire, not a real fuss for losing out but taking pot shots at TDM. But everyone else including you thinks the guy is really making a fuss and the loss is real, not made up. Anyway, he is telling something new. Everyone except for MACC knows about it. How is it that MACC never knows these things?
james - August 16, 2010 at 10:31 pm
No, James.
If you choose to swim with sharks, it is imperative that you understand the rules of the game and be prepared for the consequences. For him to cry foul when sharks do to him what sharks do and then expect public sympathy is the height of naivety.
Mr Bean - August 16, 2010 at 10:52 pm
Certainly not a satire. Not by any stretch. This guy really believes he has a cause of action in court against those individuals named. He does not understand what gratuitous promise means.
Mr Bean - August 16, 2010 at 10:58 pm
“It was a gentleman’s agreement and I had then thought Vincent was a man of his word although many had forewarned me to have everything in black and white and in proper legal terms.”
There is either an agreement or there is none. There is no such thing as a gentleman’s agreement.
Mr Bean - August 16, 2010 at 11:05 pm
Tean, kita bagi dia nama ‘Mat Kerebau’.
Mr Bean - August 16, 2010 at 11:13 pm
Aiyoyo! ” Alham umno dollarlah”. These are the screwed-up words that are constantly repeated by a regular malaysia today reader presumably a chinaman .
This 77 year old grandpapa gives credence to this bigoted persons mocking remarks. What utter disgrace!
Danildaud - August 16, 2010 at 11:51 pm
In the holy month of Ramadhan… trying to claim haram money!!! LOL! Sesat! Sesat!
ibat - August 17, 2010 at 12:09 am
I used to work for this guy. He use to be a real high flyer. Jetting around the world with his 2nd wife a Vietnamese. Until 1 day she sucked him dry. He to receive a lot of handouts from his Uncle but sold them to the Chinese for a fast buck. Nam Fah Holdings was the name of his co. He talks about this being the Fasting month but as far as I can remember he never fast and always got his office boy to go buy him, his sons and daughter food. He and his family will pretend to fast when they have to go break fast with Mahathir.
To me he dug his own grave and where is his Uncle to hel him. What I remember is that his Uncle was also fed up of him.
The Simple Man - August 17, 2010 at 12:56 am
Rahsia Mat Kerebau dah terbongkak! Mana hang tean? Kesian sunggoh dengak cerita Mat Kerebau.
Mr Bean - August 17, 2010 at 5:35 am
Hmm, what shall I rate this article? I know Din has a somewhat wicked sense of humour, but this takes the bengkang.
Hmm, how to paraphrase this article? “Im Dato so & so, related to ex PM so & so, and I still got screwed! Boo hoo hoo.”
muse - August 17, 2010 at 6:11 am
Thank you to Tean, Mr Bean and Danildaud for the excellent Kedahan language learning here for those of us who do not speak the dialect. Brings back great memories of home, excellent! I especially think ” Allham Umno Dollarlah ” is the ultimate.fantastic.
Please translate for our non kedahan speaking visitors.
It is difficult to prove as courts hearing the claim will have to interprete conduct,verbal undertakings, and he will have to prove a contract exist ( through lack of written agreement).
Speaking of “Gentlemen”. Who exactly was he referring to , Vincent Tan? Has the defintion of gentlemen changed since I last checked.
When you go doing business with those who dont have any intention to stick to their side but just use you for your contacts ( read “Sharks”), then what do you expect to get?
Or do you reckon it takes a shark to do business with a shark?
This serves as a reminder to those who intend to do business with sharks, make sure you have your swarm of bigger professional sharks to protect you and get everything written down from 1st day of meeting to agreement.
Kathy - August 17, 2010 at 7:58 am
Mat Kerebau has been upstaged by his uncle. Read this:
http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/breakingviews/article/gore-wolfowitz-and-anwar-dr-mahathir-mohamad/
Mr Bean - August 17, 2010 at 10:08 am
“He also seems to have forgotten the advice that I gave concerning the content of the proposal for this privatization. “In no way must there be mention of gain in this exercise. The gain should only be on the side of the government.” ”
Wish that Datuk A would also spill the beans on how MM got his gain from the deal. I would assume that no one, not even VT, would dare to screw someone related to MM, unless MM allowed VT to do so.. May be, just may be, VT gave Datuk A’s shares to MM… in which Datuk A is barking up the wrong tree… Think about it Datuk A…
gamelan - August 17, 2010 at 10:23 am
The Simple Man
Thanks for refreshing my memory. I don’t know about the fasting part.
Yep he married the Vietnamese and had a daughter.
I know his actor son Ako Mustapha who is three years younger than me and was born in The Hague. Ako had a baby girl end of last year named after Tun M’s mum, Tempawan.
Uncle Mat was First Secretary at our embassy in The Hague before he served Tun Razak.
He slso married a NZ journalist based here but it was a short-lived one.
Sayang bangsa - August 17, 2010 at 11:38 am
Bean
Thanks for clearing my confusion. But like you said, if you swim with sharks, be prepared to be eaten. Vincent Tan is now known internationally to be a crook and his words are as good as shit. Both NTT Docomo and KTel learnt this the hard way about a year ago but at least they got their money back – after threatening lawsuits that no one in Malaysia seems to know about. But to the Malaysian Bursa, he is seen as a saint.
james - August 17, 2010 at 10:08 pm
was very encouraged to find this site. I wanted to thank you for this special read. I definitely savored every little bit of it and I have you bookmarked to check out new stuff you post.
adrianalemus - August 25, 2010 at 3:31 pm