Tunku Abdul Aziz

There is a place for conglomerates in the business world. However, as with everything else, some are good, but mostly they invariably become unwieldy and difficult to manage effectively. Many come unstuck, leaving behind a trail of miserable examples of management failures, human greed and frailties. As always, there is a lot of cleaning up to do after the party is over. The sad truth is that we do not as yet have what it takes to run a complex business successfully, and a conglomerate is hellishly difficult to keep on a straight course because the temptation to wander off into the unfamiliar is often irresistible, and most conglomerates find themselves up a creek.

There have been many instances of major failures in the Sime stables. There was the case of the insurance business in the UK in the eighties, a member of Lloyds, which was in such a bad shape because of mismanagement that it had to be bundled with a very profitable money broking company into an attractive package and sold for a song. Sime Darby naturally had to be responsible for all the liabilities resulting from claims on policies transacted up to the time of the sale of the company. For the next several years after the sale of the company to the new owners, Sime Darby continued to send out to the UK enormous sums of money to cover the claims.

Then there was the Sime Bank debacle. Banking was a business in which it had no expertise and had to rely on the management that came along with the bank when it was acquired. The integrity of the many of the top executives running Sime Bank was questionable. What happened to the bank should have been a lesson to the board of Sime Darby about sticking to what it was good at. I well remember in Windsor, England, saying jocularly to Tunku Tan Sri Ahmad Yahaya, then Group Chief Executive, when he told me Sime Darby had acquired a bank that he would be better off getting a casino licence. Later he admitted that I was right.

I also recall the factory ship fiasco in the early eighties. The Sime Darby-owned vessel operating in the North Atlantic off the coast of Africa found itself in rough seas financially. Sime Darby decided to sack its two British employees claiming that they had got into this business without the approval of the board in Kuala Lumpur. This was patently untrue. The Brits would not be bullied into submission, and they sued Sime Darby and its Chairman, then Tun Tan Siew Sin, for wrongful dismissal, and won a very substantial sum of money in an out of court settlement. Zubir, the dismissed Group Chief Executive should not have allowed the board of Sime Darby to treat him so shabbily.

I personally believe that with a loss of this scale of magnitude, an honourable board would have resigned because obviously it has failed to discharge its fiduciary and other related responsibilities of stewardship. Zubir has been used as a scapegoat in the Anglo-Malaysian corporate tradition. If Sime Darby had been an American company, the chair would have accepted responsibility and resigned or been forced to go without ceremony. I find Musa’s logic for staying put, saying that he would resign if required to do so by the shareholders, disingenuous and self-serving to say the least. He must know he has failed as chairman, and based on the principle of collective responsibility, his board must exit with him. This is the honourable thing expected of a responsible board, and this is what I expect the much trumpeted Sime tagline, ‘Developing Sustainable Futures’ to be all about. My advice to Zubir is to consider taking Musa and his board to the cleaners. Sue them. We need in this country boards that are principled, and we can also do with a little honour and integrity in our business leadership.

Sime Darby in the meantime must take a good, hard look at itself to see if operating on the present model is sustainable. It is obvious that Sime Darby has become largely unwieldy, unmanageable, and unsustainable. It is showing all the signs of having become a conglomerate in the worst possible sense. The worst is not over yet.

(The writer is a former Group Director of Sime Darby, 1979-1985)

I suppose it is good to know that you are the God’s chosen, as the Israelis obviously do, and don’t they flaunt their special position! They believe that not only is God on their side, but, better still, for them, they know that the man wielding the greatest power on earth, Hussein Obama, presently US President, is at their beck and call, like all the rest of the occupants of the White House in post-war America. The self-proclaimed Bastion of Democracy, in reality, is nothing more than a subservient proxy of the Zionist ruling clique, the regime that has shamelessly exploited the holocaust into an art form.

Jews, while playing on humanity’s collective guilt by squeezing the last milligram of sympathy from us for the dreadful sufferings of their people at the hands of the Nazi criminals, have themselves behaved even worse than the terrorists of the Third Reich as they have not shown even a “dram of pity” (with apologies to Sybil Kathysagu) to the Palestinians whose country they have occupied since the establishment of the Jewish State more than six decades ago. The holocaust, exploited to the hilt, was nothing as compared to the unimaginable heights of cruelty inflicted over several decades on an innocent population whose only sin has been to resist the illegal occupation of their land. The Jews may not agree with this, that what they have done to the Palestinians is even more cruel than being thrown into gas chambers. At least, so some people maintain, the victims of the Auschwitz-Birkenau died a relatively “painless” death. And some others even go so far, and I distance myself from this barbaric view, as to say that the “final solution” that the Germans inflicted on the Jews was not complete and final enough.

Surely even in the name of the survival of the Israel State, the end cannot, in this case, justify the means. I have not always seen eye to eye with Mahathir, and some cynics say it is my loss, not his, but for once he was dead right when he gave the Israelis a backhanded compliment by saying how a tiny nation could exert so much power and influence on the world stage, and best of all, by using proxies to fight their wars for them. I have always been sympathetic with, and fully support the idea of a secure Jewish State: they have as much right as anyone else to live their own lives, but I have become totally disappointed and disenchanted with the unconscionable acts of inhumanity and aggression on a people who have been driven from their homeland and kept in the world’ largest open air prison that is Gaza. The Jews justify their destruction of Palestinian lives and properties by saying that Hamas have been firing rockets into “Israeli villages” forgetting to understand the root cause of the problem.

If we care to look at the dozens of UN Security Council Resolutions (66 at the last count, and counting) that have been totally ignored by the Israeli in the full knowledge that the leadership of the most powerful nation on earth, that extension of the Jewish state generally known as the US is so besotted and beholden to Jewish money that whatever their personal feelings in respect of the situation in Israeli occupied territories, it is powerless to do anything in the face of the powerful Jewish Washington Lobby. Calls for sanctions have been vetoed time and time again. It is amazing how successive presidents of the US have allowed themselves to be led by the nose and kept on a short leash by a gang of thugs and state-sanctioned terrorists whom the US government declares to be its most important allies in the Middle-East. What a sad commentary on a people who fought for their independence by overthrowing English colonial rule and, later the American Civil War only to become Israel’s foot soldiers.

The US Government must come to terms with the rapidly shifting world opinion against its patently diabolically unjust and inhuman Israeli-Palestinian policies because quite apart from issues of morality and human rights, there is the issue of peace and security that seemed so important to the US Government that it fought two major wars to topple Sadam Hussein of Iraq on the flimsiest of excuses and now fighting little wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan as part of their “war on terror.” The war on terror will not stop until the Palestinian issue is put to rest by doing what is just and fair. The Israelis must learn to respect the rest of humanity. God’s chosen people must learn to choose peace, justice and global security. America must distance itself from the Star of David and, in the process, rid itself the Jewish cross, to the eternal gratitude of God’s people everywhere.

If I am angry because of what the Jewish State has done to dehumanise a proud and innocent people, I am even more angry with the Arabs whom I despise with all my heart. That they could stand on the sidelines and watch the cruelty, humiliation and dehumanisation of fellow Arabs is utterly disgraceful because God has bestowed upon them enormous oil wealth and they could have used it for the greater good of mankind. If I have little time for the Arabs, the Egyptians take my prize for the lowest form of human life and I do not really need to explain why in the context of the Israeli blockade of Gaza. May God forgive me for my dark and ugly thoughts!

Malaysian Insider

JUNE 5 — I am told on good authority that you cannot make good china with poor clay, and it is so obvious that we should know it instinctively. By the same token, I expect you cannot form an effective Cabinet with general election rejects.

Appointing them to Cabinet posts in such large numbers through the Senate is not illegal, but is it ethical? Jesse Jackson in a speech to the 1992 National Democratic Convention reminded his audience that what was morally wrong would never be politically right.

Datuk Seri Najib Razak, as our prime minister, would do well to ponder and reflect on the wisdom of this self-evident truth so that he would feel encouraged and inspired to bring moral and ethical principles to bear on the governance of this nation. I naturally hope that in the process, and with God’s help, he will find some time to dwell upon his many grave lapses that have brought his fitness for the highest political office in the land into serious question.

Some months ago I had occasion to allude to the fact that no prime minister in our country’s history had come into office, bent over not with the burden of leadership which would have been understandable, but in Najib’s case, it was his oversize baggage comprising a mix of potent allegations of impropriety ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous.

While some may be nothing more than coffee morning tittle-tattle among the leisure classes, and, therefore, to be treated with the contempt they deserve, one worrying aspect of Najib the man that refuses to evaporate into thin air is corruption.

People still point to the arms purchases made during his long stints as minister of defence, and what he got out of them through his redoubtable defence/political analyst, Razak Baginda.

Would the MACC care to take a look at the wealth behind the man so as to give our 1 Malaysia prime minister a chance to clear his name? And while they are looking at Najib, I think it only fair that they take a look at the wealth of Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad and his family. To show that they are not being selective, they might like to check out Tun Abdullah Ahmad Badawi and his family. I am sure these great leaders of ours are dying to clear their names for the sake of their reputation, however defined.

To return to the blatant abuse of the function and role of the Senate in the constitutional life of our country, it is clear that Najib does not put great store by basic rules of the game. He obviously plays by his own rules that postulate the inevitability of immoral behaviour in politics and that scruples are not for the prime minister of Malaysia.

This is a sad commentary on 50 years of Barisan Nasional rule that has seen this once proud country now on its unstoppable decline in social, political and economic terms. Is this the promised just reward for the people of this country for putting their blind faith in the Umno leadership?

It is also a sad reflection of the bankruptcy of ethical values that those whom the people of this country, exercising their rights to choose, cast aside in a democratic process, have now been brought back into the Cabinet.

Who are these recycled seconds supposed to represent? Even if they were a galaxy of Nobel laureates, it would still be totally indefensible for Najib to show such utter contempt and disregard for public opinion by appointing them to the Cabinet. And these are by no means the crème de la crème of Malaysian brains-those that have not disappeared overseas.

Najib plays by his own rules. For him, offering inducements to voters as played out in the Hulu Selangor by-election with a repeat performance in Sibu was par for the course. He obviously could see no contradiction in urging the people to fight corruption while he himself breaks the law with complete impunity, as always aided and abetted by the ever independent Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission, so it proclaims, and the equally fearless Elections Commission.

When will Najib learn that there is no substitute for integrity in national life? It is within his power to clean up his act so as to lessen the burden of the negative views and innuendos that he carries on his back to the detriment of his effectiveness as PM.

He must learn quickly that the ultimate decision whether he remains in office, and his party in power, will be made by the very people for whom he has shown such blatant contempt. He may, at this rate, be the last Umno prime minister. — mysinchew.com