Najib: Way govt counts equity holding no secret

Najib: Way govt counts equity holding no secret

Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak yesterday took exception to inferences that the government has not been transparent over the issue of Bumiputera equity ownership.

He said the government’s methodology to calculate the equity ownership could be disclosed if necessary.( Why could,infact it should be disclosed )

"If there are those who are still sceptical, we can reveal the methodology applied."

Najib was asked to comment on the request by Gerakan president Datuk Seri Dr Lim Keng Yaik on Saturday that the government disclose how it arrived at its percentage of Bumiputera equity ownership.

Dr Lim said transparency on the matter would not give room for any party to question the government’s findings.

Najib disagreed with Dr Lim’s statement.

"What he said seems to imply that we are not transparent. We conduct our research based on an objective analysis.

"The government is transparent. There should not be any inferences that we are not," he said.

When it was pointed out that the request had come from a BN component party, Najib said its origin was irrelevant.

"It doesn’t matter who made the statement. We want to ensure that whatever figure we use is for the whole country and that it is not a modified figure in the interests of any community.

"We can disclose the method applied," he said yesterday after launching the Transport Ministry’s Deepavali and Hari Raya Road Safety Campaign.

Dr Lim’s request is the latest in the debate on the Bumiputera corporate ownership.

The issue arose when the Asian Strategy and Leadership Institute (Asli) stated that Bumiputera equity ownership may be as high as 45 per cent.

The government questioned the findings and said its more exhaustive study showed that Bumiputera corporate ownership was at 18.9 per cent.


Government prepared to show how it calculated bumi equity share

The Government is prepared to reveal the methodology and data used to calculate the 18.9% equity ownership by bumiputras, Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak said yesterday.

The Deputy Prime Minister said the Government’s figure on bumiputra equity share was based on detailed and objective studies.

“The statistics are not modified for the interest of any community. If it is necessary and there are doubts, we will release the data,” he said.

Najib said there should not be any cynical remarks implying that the Government was not transparent.

“The statement gives a picture as though the Government is not transparent. We carried out the study based on an objective assessment,” he told reporters at the launch of a road safety campaign here.

Gerakan president Datuk Seri Dr Lim Keng Yaik had said that while the party stood by the Government’s figures, it wanted the public to know how the figure was arrived at.

The issue of bumiputra equity share came up when the Centre for Public Policy Studies of the Asian Strategy and Leadership Institute (Asli) published a study that showed bumiputra equity ownership in public-listed companies could be as high as 45%.

Asli later retracted the report, saying the study was based on faulty assumptions.

Among the questions which had been asked over the methodology was whether government-linked companies should be included in the calculation. Another was whether the shares were calculated at par or market value.

Umno vice-president Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin said it was a good idea for the Government to reveal the methodology.

“As much as this has been accepted as the official formula, many may be unaware of it,” he said, adding that he did not think the Government wanted to hide anything.

Datuk Seri Mohd Ali Rustam, who is also an Umno vice-president, said the bumiputra’s 18.9% equity share was already stated in the Ninth Malaysia Plan.

He said he would support any move by the Government to reveal how the statistics was reached.

Mohd Ali, who is also Malacca Chief Minister, said companies like Tenaga Nasional Bhd and Petronas, which served all Malaysians, should not be regarded as bumiputra-owned companies in any calculation.

Gerakan central committee member Datuk Toh Kin Woon, who had been speaking out on the issue, said the public would welcome the suggestion to release the methodology.

“People generally want the Government to be more transparent and open about the computation used in obtaining the figure,” he said.

He hoped that the Economic Planning Unit and other bodies would look positively at the methodology used in Asli’s study.

MCA Youth chief Datuk Liow Tiong Lai said official statistics should be made accessible to every one so that they could be used for research.

He said as long as the Government was transparent, confusion could be avoided.



Professor's Resignation End Of The Matter?


"19 or 45 percent?" The recent controversy over bumiputera equity has had UMNO all stirred up, and the party did not hesitated to air its views about the issue in the public forum.

In the aftermath, Mirzan Mahathir chose to retract the report that sparked the controversy, a retraction which in turn caused Professor Lim Teck Ghee to resign in protest.

Mirzan is president of the Asian Strategy and Leadership Institute (ASLI), while Lim is the Director of Asli's Centre of Public Policy Studies (CPPS).

Mirzan is the boss, and if the boss chooses to compromise, he must have his own reasons. Lim isn't just a normal employee but an academic with a resolute and independent spirit, and he has the right to defend the results of his research.

Lim could not accept Mirzan's decision, neither could he be cowed by the vicious attacks on his research that were made by various politicians. He remained true to his standpoint, choosing to resign rather than to sacrifice his integrity and dignity.

It is unfortunate that rational academic research and public debate with the potential to bring about social reform has been quashed in this manner. Deliberately avoiding the topic does nothing towards finding a solution for our society's ills.

The controversial report, titled 'Corporate Equity Distribution: Past Trends and Future Policy' was originally conducted at the request of the government. It was meant to be used as a reference for drafting the 9th Malaysian Plan.

The report's conclusion is that bumiputera equity isn't 18.9%, but rather, it has already reached as high as 45%. In addition, it advised the government to place less emphasis on the division of equity, as such a practice would not only hurt the economy, but also the development of the bumiputeras.

Frankly, this is nothing new. In the past, MCA had conducted its own studies which showed that bumiputera equity had surpassed 30%. These findings had been submitted to the Barisan Nasional government but were ignored.

The idea that the New Economic Policy (NEP) might do harm than good is also old hat. Mahathir has said so and Anwar recently repeated those sentiments. Even Pak Lah has criticised the NEP in the past.

Professor Lim's research approached this important issue that directly affects our country's development from a scholarly perspective. This independent, non-partisan research effort was conducted with the interests of our nation and people at heart. Its' findings should not be casually dismissed and it should be considered an important asset to society.

If the authorities were more liberal, then this research could have been the beginning of a combined effort between the government and the public to address problems with government policy and administrative methods. It could have been an opportunity to address and solve the country's economic malaise.

At the very least, the research findings ought to have been debated over publicly and fairly. Even if the research was flawed, critics would have been able to state their arguments and corrections.

However, once the report was made public, it quickly became politicised and even became a racist issue.

Some said the report was malicious and promoted discontent. Others said the report was biased because it was conducted by a particular race. There were also those who said that the report was rubbish that should be retracted, or "stern" measures would be taken against those involved.

ASLI suddenly became a rebel organization instead of a think tank, while Professor Lim (an international academic who was highly thought of in universities and the UN) was portrayed as a dastardly villain plotting to destroy our nation.

If we disregard the political benefits, then the question of equity becomes a purely economic concern. If we do not examine current policy based on accurate figures and statistics, how can we discover the problems and come up with solutions to solve them?

The country is currently experiencing problems such as sluggish economic growth, a wide disparity between the rich and the poor, as well as weak production and competitive ability. These are warning signs informing us that the policy is flawed. If the authorities continue to deny the existence of these flaws and reject constructive criticism, then they are only compounding the problems.

Lim's resignation doesn't mean that anything has been resolved. The problems have only been covered up, and everyone is just pretending that everything is fine. The report and Professor Lim will become yesterday's news and soon be forgotten, until one day the problems can no longer be hidden and everything falls apart. By then it will be too late to do anything.



UM Restructuring To Start Next Year To Improve Ranking

Universiti Malaya will introduce changes in its enrolment policy in January next year to improve its ranking under the The Times Higher Education Supplement (THES).

The restructuring included lowering its first degree intake from 20,000 to 15,000 students; increasing its Masters and Doctorate intake from 9,000 to 15,000, said its Student Affairs and Alumni Deputy Vice-Chancellor Datuk Dr Razali Agus.

"We will also put in efforts to improve the mastering of other languages, particularly English, among the students," he said when officiating the Independence Appreciation Night organised by the Universiti Malaya Islamic Graduates Association Saturday night.

Recently, THES ranked the university at 192nd placing in its world universities ranking. It was at 169th placing a year ago.

Dr Razali said the large intake of first degree students, the lower intake for Masters and PhDs, and poor proficiency in English were the main factors in the lower ranking.

In addition, the hiring of the university's graduates by employers and multinational corporations (MNCs) was a crucial factor in the ranking. He said to date, only 38 percent of the students in the university were scoring a CGPA above 3.0.

As such, he hoped the students in the university would be ready to face the challenge and help each other to improve their grade to a level demanded by employers and MNCs.

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Expect more shocks from North Korea

By TOM PLATE

Today's level of anxiety and near-panic in the U.S. news media is amazing. It is almost as if America's leading journalists are thrilled to be writing about something other than Iraq finally. Thank you, Kim Jong Il -- we were all getting rather bored.

And more shocks may be coming, and they may not be far into the future. Should we anticipate nuclear weapons tests by North Korea becoming commonplace? Why not? Having crossed the threshold, there may not be any turning back.

Get a grip, though: Nuclear powers do not necessarily launch nuclear wars. None of the nation-states possessing such arsenals have yet used any, except the United States. And its weapons -- two of them -- were ironically used against an Asian nonnuclear power. This was in 1945, in Asia -- against the Japanese. The North Koreans know this.

Have you seen many stories in the U.S. news media acknowledging the legal right of North Korea to test and possess nuclear weapons? Loathsome as the regime is, North Korea nonetheless is a sovereign state with all atomic rights thereto. It pulled out of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty a few years ago and hardly made any secret of its nuclear ambitions. Having announced it was breaking the nuclear glass, subsequent tests should come as anything but a breathtaking surprise.

There is a remote possibility that the clock can be set backward on that. The dispatch of a primo high-level envoy would be worth trying. Former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker and incoming U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon have already been mentioned as sacrificial diplomats. At this point, perhaps everything and anything is worth throwing at Pyongyang.

The only unacceptable option for the world is panic: We have only to fear the onset of fear itself. With an Asia-based crisis such as the North Korean nuclear program, sometimes Asian values are worth employing. This means patience and persistence, quietude and humility, rather than saber-rattling and blustering.

Time is not on Kim's side. The basic width and breadth of his power is eroding as people starve and Internet information technology dribbles over the borders into the "hermit state." People in North Korea now have a better idea of what life is like outside of their restrictive confines; they increasingly sense that their workers' paradise is anything but Miami Beach on its best day.

I have been saying for months that a quiet coup has taken place inside North Korea. In the ordinary ideology of communist governance, everything is subservient to the party, even the military; but in today's North Korea, Kim is the military and the military is Kim. He and they are the last remaining power center, holed up as if at a Korean Alamo.

And so when the military pushed to fire off a bunch of rocket tests in July, who was Kim to say no? He was them: And so ditto with Monday's apparent nuclear-bomb test -- as small in size as it was. Whatever the military now wants, it gets.

Perhaps for the Bush administration, logic would suggest that the best ploy to play would be the waiting game. Let sanctions serve as a Chinese water-torture exercise on Pyongyang's head. Notch by notch, drip by drip, the regime will be eroded. But for the West as a cultural entity, waiting is not its strong suit. That's the Asian game.

No food or beverage will be removed from the tables of the North Korean elite no matter how tight the sanctions tourniquet. Those who will starve and die, in increasing numbers, will be ordinary Koreans in the north, and the boys in Pyongyang will roll up their limousine curtains and shed not a tear for their countrymen.

That's why the better play is to engineer secret negotiations with a special envoy and Kim himself. But our envoy needs to go in with the firm understanding and complete backing from Washington and Beijing -- not to mention Tokyo -- and bundles of cash topped with other goodies. The world needs to buy the North back from a total plunge into the nuclear brink, to which it will inevitably edge closer and closer should the West seek to isolate it more and more.

The prospect for a negotiated denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula is not a wild-eyed impossibility. We need only to return to the agreed declaration of principles of the "six-party talks" in Beijing last year.

On the list was the explicit agreement among the half-dozen nations (which included Pyongyang, of course) on no nukes in North or South Korea: "The six parties unanimously reaffirmed that the goal of the six-party talks is the verifiable denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula in a peaceful manner."

The nonnuclear option still remains the best course for the Koreans and the world. It may seem unlikely now, but in retrospect, an international agreement that recognizes North Korean sovereignty, the need for a nuclear-free Peninsula, and the importance of an economically developed North will seem like simplicity itself. And it's hard to see why this could not be achieved before this time next year.

Just consider the alternative.

UCLA professor Tom Plate is a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy.


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