Malaysians who had rallied together under the clarion call of Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir’s "Vision 2020"
and the self-deceiving propaganda of "Malaysia Boleh!" or "Malaysia Can!" now find that in their hurry to
get to 2020, they took many unwise and misguided short-cuts, pushed too hard and too fast, failed to
implement proper safe-guards (and even ignored safe-guards that were already there), attracted unwanted
short-term investments which they had no control over and which fled as just as suddenly as they came in,
borrowed too heavily, over-spent on large-scale projects which now face abandonment or underutilization
all at the behest and encouragement of the government, mismanaged their enterprises and spent large sums
for unproductive purposes. This they all deny, of course, maintaining the deception that what they did was
appropriate and correct for the circumstances at the time.

In fact, the problems Malaysia is facing today - the root cause of the disease - may perhaps be traced even
further back than the mid-1980’s to the mid-1970’s, when Dr. Mahathir was then the Deputy Prime
Minister. From the time of his appointment in 1975 by Hussein Onn, the Prime Minister, over the heads of
two other more senior Vice-Presidents of UMNO, the main party in the ruling coalition, Ghaffar Baba and
Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah, Mahathir probably knew that sooner or later he would have to face a challenge
from Razaleigh who was then Minister of Finance and was also in a better financial position and had
arguably better support among the grass-roots of UMNO than Mahathir at the time.

The man Mahathir chose to be the key-man in his defence campaign was Daim and it was Daim’s job
essentially to raise the funds which this entailed. Daim’s main vehicle for this purpose was a company called
Peremba, which also became the grooming ground for the young managers who in their 30’s in the late
1980’s were appointed by Daim to head large public-listed companies but still reported to him even though
he himself did not appear as a shareholder or director. At the same time he maneuvered himself into control
of Fleet (and directly and indirectly into many other companies as well), UMNO’s investment vehicle, which
had before that been controlled by Razaleigh and his men. Fleet was then in control of the New Straits
Times group, the largest media group in Malaysia and which also owns TV3, the first private TV station in
Malaysia.

Under Daim, Fleet made many blind and questionable investments, including the purchase of a controlling
stake in Faber Merlin, a public-listed hotel and property company which had been mismanaged and bled
dry by Chang Ming Thien and which by the mid-1980’s had accumulated losses running into the hundreds
of million ringgit. Interestingly, Chang Ming Thien was also the Chairman of the United Malayan Banking
Corporation, UMBC, in his capacity as a Trustee of MCA (the main Chinese party component of the ruling
coalition).
 
 
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