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Time to free Petronas from BN's firm grip
By Tan Kee Kwong
COMMENT I am alarmed by the fact that for the past three years, national oil company Petronas has given RM290 billion to the Barisan Nasional-led federal government.
What a fantastic sum of money? Can the prime minister and his two predecessors tell us the rakyat how they spent or wasted this huge sum of money?
As I have said before, Petronas as an entity was and still is quite a well run company but the past three prime ministers have ruined it all.
A special Act of Parliament passed in the 1970's – the Petroleum Development Act (PDA), ensured that Petronas was only accountable to the prime minister of the day. In the past, we had two ministers in charge of oil but without any say at all.
Even under PDA, the Finance Minister has no say, even the Cabinet cannot examine the true accounts of Petronas. What a shame. This is totally unacceptable.
Under Dr Mahathir Mohamad , dividends paid by Petronas to the government was about RM2 to RM3 billion annually.
And then when Abdullah Ahmad Badawi took over, he forced Petronas to pay RM10 billion, and then increased it to RM20 billion before finally forcing the oil company to pay RM30 billion.
Where did all this money go? Did they go to mainly finance all the budget deficits during his rule?
It was during this time there were many useless defence spendings. Let's not forget that in the 1980s and 1990s, about RM100 billion of Petronas money went to bail out Bank Bumiputra, twice.
During the financial crisis in 1997, the government once again relied on Petronas to buy out shipping company MISC in order to bail out Mahathir's son.
KLCC land scandal
I remember in the mid-1950's my family stayed for two years in Jalan Pinang in the heart of Kuala Lumpur. At that time only the race course was there. As kids we enjoyed plucking the delicious rambutans there. Now however it is so different.
When the Petronas headquarters was housed in the Dayabumi building, there was a severe shortage of office space as Petronas operations expanded very fast.
Initially the plan was to build a new HQ in Jalan Tun Razak, opposite the Royal Selangor Golf Club, which presently sites the Prince Court Hospital.
That plan was aborted as the Department of Civil Aviation objected strongly as it was in the flight path of the Sungai Besi RMAF air base.
Then Petronas went ahead to buy a piece of land in Jalan Ampang, behind Yow Chuan Plaza for only RM30 million.
However suddenly Mahatir intervened and came out with a devious plan to steal the money from Petronas to enrich his special cronies.
Part of the plan was to create noise in the press on how the race course in Jalan Pinang was causing massive traffic jams every weekends. After that the federal government and the Kuala Lumpur City Hall decided that the race course must be shifted to Sungai Besi, its present site.
But the government did not ask the Turf Club to surrender or even sell its land to Petronas. What they did was to force the Turf Club to sell its prime land to a very special Mahathir crony.
In turn, the crony made a huge profit by selling off that land to Petronas for RM600 million. The top brass of Petronas was instructed not to negotiate the price and to just pay.
Oil blocks given away
During Abdullah's time, he oversaw a scandal that cost the nation US$100 billion by giving away two oil blocks to Brunei.
I wonder what made Abdullah to agree to give away our oil to Brunei. Maybe in one of his naps in public, he just assigned our rights to Brunei.
In the past Petronas went into joint sharing agreements with Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Indonesia and others.
This should have been the same agreement with Brunei in the case of Block L and Block M.
The BN government must come clean on the real affairs of Petronas. For starters, the PDA must be abolished and replaced by a better and transparent piece of legislation.
More importantly, the financial affairs of Petronas must be made accountable to the Parliament.
Tan Kee Kwong is a former deputy minister in the BN government. He is now a PKR leader.
