Whatever the case may be, it had rapidly become apparent to Malaysians that in Mahathir they had found a
modern-day Fir’aun or Pharaoh, and Daim was his Qaarun. Anwar was the outsider in the pack and never
really found his niche.

It is rather difficult to talk about Reformasi in a den of thieves.

Such exercises came to a temporary slowdown, in fact almost dead-stop, when recession hit Malaysia in the
mid-1980’s by which time Fleet’s total liabilities had gone into the billion ringgit range while UMNO had
been deregistered (based on a legal strategy advised by his lawyers and adopted by Mahathir himself) as a
result of the fight between Mahathir and Razaleigh.

UMNO’s assets, including its shares in Fleet and other investments, were handed over to the Official
Assignee while Mahathir, who had won by a narrow margin, consolidated his grip on power by forming the
New UMNO and Razaleigh was forced into the opposition and formed Semangat ’46, the Spirit of ’46, a
reference to the birth of UMNO amidst opposition to the Malayan Union plan which the British had
proposed to impose upon Malaya after World War II.

The Malaysian and Singapore stock markets crashed in October 1987 as a result of the collapse of Pan-El,
a company which had come under the control of the President of MCA at the time, Tan Koon Swan, who
went to prison in Singapore for certain wrongdoings related to the collapse. Was Tan Koon Swan merely a
scapegoat? Could he have been one of Daim’s numerous "nominees"? Whatever the case, these and other
similar wrongdoings were merely the symptoms of the general and wider disease affecting Malaysian
business and politics at the time, and which would return to haunt Malaysia with a vengeance and at far
greater cost almost exactly 10 years later, a cost which the Malaysian public is not able nor should be made
to bear. Reformasi is beginning to look brighter and brighter.

Malaysian politicians and businessmen had begun digging holes and they could never really stop as they kept
on digging bigger and bigger holes to cover up previous holes. It became a vicious circle out of which
Mahathir, Daim and their cronies never got out of and the whole country would suffer (is now suffering) as a
consequence. The holes would collectively eventually become so large that even a hole the size of the
aborted (or postponed) Bakun Dam which would have created a lake - or an inland sea rather - the size of
Singapore would not have been enough to cover them all up.
 

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