Selasa, 22 Februari 2011

Anwar Ibrahim

Anwar Ibrahim


Pro-M UPM Bantah Calon Mereka Menang Dibatalkan

Posted: 22 Feb 2011 06:52 PM PST

Dari Harakah

50 aktivis Pro-M UPM terpaksa bersengkang mata sejak awal malam tadi, bagi mengadakan perhimpunan untuk membantah keputusan Jawatankuasa Pelaksana PRK yang membatalkan kemenangan semua calon mereka.

Mereka bersama 11 calon mereka mula berkumpul di hadapan pejabat pentadbiran UPM sejak jam 10.30 malam tadi, sejurus selepas dimaklumkan pembatalan kemenangan calon-calon mereka oleh Ketua Unit Tindakan Tatatertib Hal Ehwal Pelajar (Hep) UPM, Noraihan Noordin jam 9.30 malam tadi.

Jurucakap Majlis Politik Nasional (MPN) Gamis, Shukri Kamarudin menjelaskan, pembatalan kemenangan mereka itu dimaklumkan oleh Noraihan kepada semua calon Pro-M menerusi telefon, atas alasan disebabkan mereka menyertai PRK secara berkumpulan.

Menurut beliau, pada hal pihak lawan mereka, Aspirasi, juga menyertai PRK secara berkumpulan, tetapi anehnya semua kemenangan calon Aspirasi tidak pula dibatalkan.

Katanya, keputusan tersebut amat mengejutkan dan ia tentunya tidak boleh diterima sekali-kali oleh mereka, sehingga menyebabkan mereka terpaksa berkumpul di hadapan pejabat pentadbiran UPM sehingga saat ini, bagi menyampaikan bantahan rasmi kepada pihak pentadbiran universiti itu.

“Sehubungan itu, saya telah menghubungi Timbalan Menteri Pengajian Tinggi, Datuk Saifuddin Abdullah sekitar jam 12.30 malam tadi untuk menyatakan bantahan kami kepadanya.

“Datuk Saifuddin sendiri juga amat terkejut dan berasa aneh dengan pembatalan kemenangan calon-calon Pro-M itu. Beliau turut berjanji akan menyelesaikan perkara itu kerana ia merupakan sesuatu yang tidak sepatutnya berlaku,” katanya ketika menghubungi Harakahdaily hari ini.

Setelah menunggu sekian lama, mereka baru berpeluang untuk mengadakan perbincangan dan menyampaikan bantahan kepada pihak pentadbiran UPM, setelah Naib Canselor UPM, Datuk Ir Radin Umar tiba sekitar jam 8.00 pagi tadi.

“Sebaik Datuk Ir Radin tiba, kami terus menyerbunya dan Datuk Ir Radin bersetuju untuk mengadakan perbincangan mengenai perkara itu dengan kami dengan diwakili calon-calon Pro-M di biliknya sekejap lagi,” jelasnya.

Pembatalan kemenangan calon-calon Pro-M itu melibatkan 9 kerusi Fakulti dan 2 kerusi Umum yang ditandingi mereka, dengan mengikuti segala peraturan yang telah ditetapkan oleh Jawatankuasa Pelaksana PRK dan pihak pentadbiran UPM sendiri.

Kini bilangan aktivis Pro-M yang mengikuti perhimpunan itu semakin bertambah. Dari hanya 50 orang, kini bilangan mereka sudah meningkat ke angka 100 orang dan bilangan itu dijangka akan terus meningkat dari semasa ke semasa.

“Yang kami tuntut hanyalah keadilan. Kenapa seteruk ini diskriminasi yang dilakukan terhadap kami, tetapi kepada pihak Aspirasi tidak pula dibatalkan kemenangannya?” katanya.

Sidang Media Pimpinan Pakatan Rakyat Dan Menteri Besar / Ketua Menteri Pakatan Rakyat

Posted: 22 Feb 2011 05:46 PM PST

MAKLUMAN MEDIA
Tarikh: 23 Februari 2011

SIDANG MEDIA PIMPINAN PAKATAN RAKYAT DAN MENTERI BESAR / KETUA MENTERI PAKATAN

Dimaklumkan bahawa satu sidang media akan diadakan selepas Mesyuarat Pimpinan Pakatan Rakyat dan Menteri Besar / Ketua Menteri Pakatan.

Sidang media ini akan diadakan pada hari ini:

Tarikh : 23 Februari 2011 (Rabu)

Masa : 6:30 petang

Tempat : Ibu Pejabat Parti Keadilan Rakyat
Merchant Square, Tropicana, Petaling Jaya

Antara yang akan menghadiri sidang akhbar ini adalah YB Dato' Seri Anwar Ibrahim, YB Dato' Seri Haji Abdul Hadi Awang, YB Tuan Lim Kit Siang dan Menteri Besar / Ketua Menteri Pakatan serta para Pimpinan Kanan Pakatan Rakyat .

Wakil media dijemput hadir untuk meliputi sidang media ini.

Sekian, terima kasih.

Lessons From a Whirlwind

Posted: 22 Feb 2011 05:43 PM PST

From Asia Times Online

By Donald K Emmerson

At this phase in a still unfolding process, all one can safely say of the overthrows in Tunis and Cairo and their spreading repercussions is that they have thrown into question the future of autocracy from the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian Gulf. There are things one can unsafely say, however. Events to date evoke three broad, and broadly revisionist, conclusions:

1. The domino theory is not always wrong
In 1975, when the Indochinese dominos fell to communism, they did not bring down the chain of adjacent Southeast Asian states from Thailand through Malaysia to the Philippines and Indonesia. What toppled was the domino theory itself – the expectation that this would happen. The radical Islamists who seized power in Tehran in 1979 could not knock over the governments of

neighboring states in the name of that revolution.

More recently, the Wolfowitzean fantasy of toppling Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein and setting off a chain reaction that would democratize the Middle East was revealed for what it was – absurd. By then the entirely reasonable idea that countries were not inert objects whose stability depended on having stable neighbors had congealed into a conventional wisdom.

Fast forward to 2011. Less than a month separated the January 14 and February 11 ousters of president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali from Tunis and of Hosni Mubarak from Cairo. Major protest demonstrations have also broken out in Algiers, Amman, Benghazi, Manama, Rabat, Sana’a and Tehran.

Each of these situations is unique; the sequence has been not neatly linear; and it remains to be seen how many more regimes will succumb to pressure from the streets. But the whirlwind across North Africa and the Middle East certainly has illustrated the power of events in one place to inspire them elsewhere in the same region, as a domino theorist would expect.

Proliferating linkages in cyber-space have enhanced the chance that what happens in one place will be quickly and widely known in another. Imitation is not the necessary outcome of awareness. Without their own, home-grown reasons for revolt, the texting and tweeting Cairenes who filled Tahrir Square would not have followed the Tunisian example. That said, however, and other things being equal, access to electronic networks has everywhere lowered the barriers to local mobilization.

A first lesson of these events is that we are likely to see more electronically facilitated demonstration effects spilling across national borders, and more reliance on the Internet to achieve local change.

2. The medium is not the message
There is no such thing as “liberation technology” if by that we mean that cyber-space is intrinsically or inevitably anti-tyrannical – that “information wants to be free” in a political sense. Information does not “want” anything. Democracy is not a tweet. A camera phone with Internet access empowers whoever holds it. But cyber-linkages can be put to progressive or regressive use.

Democrats are the not only ones capable of drawing inferences from recent events. What Ben Ali and Mubarak did or did not do is doubtless already being studied by more than a few of the world’s remaining autocrats for clues to avoiding the same fate.

When Mubarak shut down the Internet, he behaved as if cyber-space itself had become the enemy of his regime. If dictators are intrinsically fearful of change, if instead of using new technology they ignore it, and if they close themselves off from information about the way things really are, they will tilt the electronic playing field against themselves. An early student of cybernetics and politics, Karl Deutsch, used to say that power is the ability not to have to listen, to which one could add: until it’s too late.

For clever autocrats, on the other hand, the lesson of Tahrir Square may be that their incumbency depends on innovating and manipulating “repression technology”: that if halting the flow of information is futile, managing and using it is not. Coercion can be calibrated, as Cherian George has argued with reference to the hitherto successful maintenance of Singapore’s illiberal regime.

The uniqueness of conditions in that city-state sharply limits the exportability of its synoptic and thermostatic model of control. But the Internet among other channels of communication can and will be used in efforts to postpone plural politics in the name of state performance – trying to sideline the desire for democracy by acknowledging and responding to the need for welfare.

Striking in this context is the February 9 decision by Syria’s authoritarian president Bashar al-Assad to reverse Mubarak’s pull-the-plug tactic by canceling long-standing bans on Facebook and YouTube inside Syria. His reasoning, including his timing, is unclear. But it may reflect a sense of confidence following the failure of an anti-government protest to materialize on the previous weekend despite the willingness of some 15,000 people to join the Facebook page calling for “days of rage”. A cyber-strategy of surveillance and co-optation is rendered all the more plausible by Assad’s previous leadership of the Syrian Computer Society, whose advertised goals include shaping and regulating the local use of information technology.

One can hope that the Internet will help civil societies grow, but cyber-space will remain contested terrain.

3. The secular should not be discounted
In many academic and policy circles, the rise of religion around the world has become, so to speak, an article of faith. The faith is not misplaced. Since the 1970s, Islam has indeed become a more visible frame of personal and social reference among Muslims around the world. The local versions and extents of that global phenomenon have varied substantially from time to time and place to place, but not enough to refute the existence of the trend itself.

It is accordingly fashionable in Western academic and policy settings to downplay the relevance of the secular in the Muslim world. The toponym itself privileges religious affiliation as the defining characteristic of societies from Morocco to Mindanao. Yet Islam is only one reference point in the typically multivalent lives of populations whose actual – as opposed to self-acknowledged – daily fealty to their faith may range from pious to perfunctory.

If religion really had the behavioral weight that the notion of “rising Islam” implies, the revolts in Tunisia, Egypt and other countries lumped together in such an avowedly “Muslim world” would already have inspired the slogans if the not also the aims of the demonstrators.

That has not been true. In Cairo, the slogan that “Islam is the solution” was replaced on Tahrir Square by a motto that paid homage to another nation: “Tunisia is the solution.” In country after country, far from rallying under the banner of Islam, the young demonstrators waved or wore the national flag, or showed their familiarity with hypermodern – that is, virtual – reality in signs proclaiming “GAME OVER” for dictators.

Nationalism and cyber-space are not “secular” in an anti-religious sense. Islam has inspired nationalism in Muslim-majority countries since colonial times. Muslim and Islamist websites dot the net. Yet while some protesters have shouted “Allahu akbar!” and prayed in the streets, most have not couched their demands in Islamic terms.

The Shi’ite majority’s resentment of Sunni-minority rule has been a key subtext of the protests in Bahrain. But that example hardly reflects the rise of Islam as a single, shared identity. On the contrary, it re-expresses sectarian grievances that have long divided Muslims. And even those grievances have been less theological than socioeconomic. If “secular” means simply non-religious, then the whirlwind so far has been a secular affair.

This may change when the wind dies down, as Islamist political parties and movements become involved in post-euphoric or “morning after” processes of actual – or, at any rate, ostensible – reform, including prospective elections.

Islamists in exile have already come home in the hope of influencing events – Rachid Ghannouchi in Tunis, Yusuf al-Qaradawi in Cairo. The Barack Obama administration’s recent decision to veto a United Nations Security Council resolution declaring Israeli settlements illegal will add Islamist, Arabist, and nationalist anti-American fuel to political fires. But the young people who started the storm were not trying to recreate the caliphate. Nor were their demands for freedoms, jobs, and justice, or their disgust over corruption, distinctively Koranic.

If the mainly secular-nationalist minorities who protested are rewarded with majority rule, more explicit religious preferences will have to be taken into account. Yet their likely future influence should not be exaggerated. It is time to retire the fear that an Islamist party that wins an election and becomes the government is bound to cancel all future balloting in order to remain in power. The record of democratically empowered Islamism does not corroborate that suspicion.

From Jakarta to Cairo and back
Muslim-majority Indonesia became a democracy more than a decade ago. Since then, no Islamist party has won a national election by a wide enough margin to form a government on its own. More and less Islamist parties have joined ruling coalitions, and their leaders have become ministers in cabinets. Yet the behavior of these ostensibly religious politicians has not deviated much from what one would expect of their secular counterparts.

Pious candidates who invoke ethical behavior as an Islamic imperative do, however, run the risk of failing to practice what they preach. If politics is the art of compromise, it can also be compromising. Leaders who claim to cleave to a higher standard of morality are especially vulnerable to the charge of hypocrisy if their practices transgress their principles. An Indonesian example is the Justice and Prosperity Party (PKS), an Islamist member of the current ruling coalition. Allegations of corruption leveled at the PKS have been particularly damaging because they so sharply contradict the party’s association with pious probity.

A more risible illustration occurred in November 2010 when Indonesia’s cabinet ministers lined up to welcome Barack and Michelle Obama to Jakarta. One of the ministers was a leading PKS politician, Tifatul Sembiring. He had prided himself, as a “good Muslim”, on shunning physical contact with any woman who was not a relative. Nevertheless, when his turn came to greet the US’s First Lady, he shook her hand.

Sembiring claimed to have done so only because she had stuck out her own hand, effectively forcing him to touch it against his will. His blame-the-guest gambit backfired, however, when he was shown on video smiling and extending his own hand proactively to her. The scene went viral in cyber-space. The minister had managed to turn inconsistency into hypocrisy – and himself into an object of amused derision among more cosmopolitan Indonesians. He had also reinforced an image of Islam as a forbidding religion in both senses of that adjective.

In North Africa and the Middle East, the Muslim Brothers may be more skilled in public relations. But Sembiring’s case illustrates the difficulty of observing exclusionary prohibitions in a modern democracy whose citizens want to engage with, and be included in, the larger world.

The views of the arguably moderate Egyptian Islamist Qaradawi are instructive in this context. Accessible at IslamonLine.net, his recommendations on “Shaking Hands with Women” rest on a complex scholarly analysis of contrasting texts and opinions. His major conclusion amounts to a series of negations: that it is not forbidden for a Muslim man to shake the hand of a woman who is not his relative by blood or marriage, provided that doing so is not motivated by, and that it will not stimulate, sexual temptation.

Should a conscientious Muslim be able to predict the future? Where does an aesthetic appreciation of beauty end and the risk of physical attraction begin? What if they co-occur? Does avoiding contact to prevent temptation prolong and encourage irresponsibility and immaturity by precluding occasions in which the man allows himself to feel tempted, but then overcomes the feeling by practicing self-control? Is dating the enemy of marriage? What is the nature of love?

It is not disrespectful of either Islam or of Qaradawi to wonder whether such questions could conceivably arise in the mind of a believer trying to follow his advice. Political parties that are committed to religious strictures that imply social closure and reinforce communal identity are likely to have limited appeal.

In Indonesia recently, fearing that its Islamist coloration might have become a political liability, the PKS has tried to soften its image and broaden its popularity among secular Muslims and non-Muslims as well. Still more recently in Egypt, in a Friday sermon delivered to a crowd of more than a million people gathered in Tahrir Square, Qaradawi made a point of honoring the country’s Coptic Christian minority and urging respect for freedom and pluralism.

The future of democracy in North Africa and the Middle East is still up in the air, but the whirlwind to date points toward these conclusions:

Politically consequential spread effects will become more common, and as they do, those resisting change will try to rival, divert, co-opt, filter, and block the offending cyber-traffic.

In Muslim-majority societies that do manage to democratize, although anti-religious secularism will remain rare, non-religious secularity will be amply evident in many contexts: demands for modern education and employment in this life; nationalist pride that is not slanted to favor the pious; disgust with corruption especially by religionists with double standards; and the moderating compromises that absolutist politicians in competitive politics will have to make if they want to win.

Donald K Emmerson is an affiliate of the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies at Stanford University and a co-author of Islamism: Contested Perspectives on Political Islam (2010). His website is http://seaf.stanford.edu/people/donaldkemmerson/.

Hentikan Segera Pembunuhan Rakyat Libya

Posted: 22 Feb 2011 02:22 AM PST

KENYATAAN MEDIA
22 Februari 2011
BIRO PENERANGAN PARTI KEADILAN RAKYAT

KENYATAAN MEDIA UNTUK HEBAHAN SEGERA

Petaling Jaya, Selangor, 22 Februari 2011, Parti Keadilan Rakyat (KEADILAN), berasa amat sedih dan memandang serius perkembangan politik yang sedang berlaku di Libya sekarang ini. Rakyat yang bangkit menentang pemerintah kuku besi berhadapan dengan tindak balas pihak berkuasa yang tidak berperikemaknusian. Jelas sekali, pemerintah Libya secara terbuka telah mengisytiharkan perang terhadap rakyatnya sendiri.

KEADILAN ingin menzahirkan sokongan terhadap rakyat mana-mana negara sekalipun yang bangkit menyatakan bantahan mereka terhadap pemerintah yang zalim. Kebebasan bersuara merupakan hak asasi rakyat. Pemerintah bertanggungjawab memastikan bahawa hak yang dijamin masyarakat antarabangsa ini dihormati dan dilaksanakan.
J
ustru, KEADILAN menuntut pemerintah Libya segera menghentikan tindakan zalim membunuh rakyat secara beramai-ramai. KEADILAN yakin bahawa rakyat Libya berupaya menentukan nasib mereka sendiri tanpa campur tangan mana-mana pihak yang berkepentingan.

KEADILAN menyeru seluruh lapisan masyarakat antarabangsa mengambil tindakan segera bagi menghentikan pelbagai tindakan tidak berperikemanusiaan. Pertubuhan Bangsa-bangsa Bersatu, Liga Arab dan Pertubuhan Negara-negara Islam tidak boleh berdiam diri berpeluk tubuh membiarkan rakyat Libya terus dibunuh oleh pemerintahnya sendiri.

KEADILAN juga mendesak Kerajaan Malaysia yang menganggotai PBB, NAM dan OIC supaya berperanan tegas dalam menangani isu-isu seperti ini.

Dr Muhammad Nur Manuty
Ketua Penerangan

Adakah Saiful Homoseksual Pasif?

Posted: 21 Feb 2011 11:11 PM PST

Dari Malaysiakini

Peguam veteran Karpal Singh hari ini sekali lagi mencuri tumpuan pada perbicaraan kes liwat membabitkan Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim dengan menyoal ahli kimia sama ada Mohd Saiful Bukhari Azlan adalah homoseksual pasif.

Fokus perbicaraan pagi ini adalah sama ada Jabatan Kimia mematuhi piawaian antarabangsa dalam amalannya mengendalikan sampel atau bahan bukti yang diberikan oleh polis.

Namun, Karpal yang berusia 71 tahun yang tiba kemudian untuk menyoal balas pakar DNA Dr Seah Lay Hong sekali lagi merobekkan kes pendakwaan.

Beliau menyoal beberapa profail DNA yang ditemui pada dubur Saiful dan bertanya sama ada wajar untuk membuat kesimpulan bahawa mangsa adalah homoseksual pasif.

Dr Seah berkata beliau tidak boleh menjawap soalan itu dan hakim Mahkamah Tinggi, Kuala Lumpur, Datuk Mohamad Zabidin Mohd Diah tidak membenarkan soalan tersebut.

Namun, apabila Karpal membuktikan relevan soalan berkenaan, hakim Zabidin berlembut.

Menurut Karpal, profail DNA berdasarkan lebih satu penyumbang di dubur Saiful, adalah logik bagi membuat kesimpulan bahawa pengadu adalah homoseksual pasif.

Seah berkata beliau tidak akan mengatakan sama ada bersetuju ataupun membantah cadangan Karpal itu.

Karpal juga bertanya kepada ahli kimia tersebut bagaimana DNA seseorang boleh ditemui pada dubur Saiful jika dinyatakan pada borang pro-forma ia adalah cubaan meliwat.

Karpal: Jika ini cubaan meliwat, awak tidak akan jumpa DNA orang lain di duburnya?

Seah: Tidak mustahil.

Sidang Media Berhubung Ekuiti Bumiputera

Posted: 21 Feb 2011 11:01 PM PST

-Kenyataan Media-

KETELUSAN DALAM PENGAGIHAN SAHAM KHAS BUMIPUTRA

Parti Keadilan Rakyat ingin menarik perhatian rakyat kepada pengumuman terbaru yang dibuat oleh Menteri Industri dan Perdagangan Antarabangsa, Datuk Seri Mustapa Mohamad mengenai pengagihan saham khas bumiputra melalui tawaran awam permulaan (IPO).

Datuk Seri Mustapa menyatakan bahawa kerajaan Umno/BN telah berjaya meningkatkan ekuiti Bumiputra dalam sektor swasta ke aras 22%; sebahagian besarnya melalui pengagihan saham khas bumiputra yang dilaksanakan oleh kementerian beliau.

Rakyat sudah tentu merasa janggal apabila kerajaan Umno/BN mendabik dada apabila hanya berjaya meningkatkan ekuiti Bumiputra ke tahap 22% dalam tahun 2011, sedangkan ia gagal mencapai sasaran 30% yang ditetapkan untuk tahun 1990. Selepas 21 tahun dan penyelewengan saham berjumlah puluhan bilion ringgit atas nama Melayu dan Bumiputra, kini Umno/BN tidak lagi memikirkan persoalan maruahnya dan akan sanggup mendabik dada walau sekelumit mana pun peningkatan ekuiti Bumiputra.

Walau bagaimana pun, kebimbangan sebenar PKR adalah berhubung pengurusan agihan saham khas Bumiputra memandangkan skim agihan yang sama telah menyebabkan sejumlah RM52 bilion dari RM54 bilion saham yang diagihkan kepada Bumiputra lesap begitu sahaja, seperti yang diakui Perdana Menteri sendiri.

Dalam tahun 2010 sahaja, sebanyak 1.5 bilion saham dari 18 tawaran awam permulaan diagihkan kononnya kepada pelabur Bumiputra. Tahun 2010 juga menyaksikan apungan saham yang terbesar akhir-akhir ini, termasuklah yang melibatkan Petronas Chemical Group Berhad pada harga tawaran RM5.05 setiap saham dan Malaysian Marine and Heavy Engineering Holding Berhad pada harga tawaran RM3.61 setiap saham. Jika sebahagian besar dari 1.5 bilion saham yang diagihkan kepada pelabur Bumiputra itu datangnya dari saham-saham syarikat Petronas ini, maka saham yang bernilai berbilion ringgit telah pun diagihkan kepada pelabur-pelabur yang berselindung di belakang nama Bumiputra.

Mekanisme agihan inilah yang telah gagal sebelum ini hingga mewujudkan budaya politik naungan yang mencari jalan mudah mendapatkan saham dengan berselindung di sebalik alasan mencapai sasaran 30% ekuiti Bumiputra. Akhirnya, berpuluh-puluh bilion ringgit saham yang diagihkan kepada individu-individu berkepentingan dijual dengan segera untuk mendapatkan kekayaan mudah, lalu mewujudkan golongan elit kaya Melayu yang sebenarnya menjadi kaya dengan menindas orang Melayu terbanyak.

Oleh itu, mekanisme yang sama yang telah menyebabkan kerugian RM52 bilion saham Bumiputra ini perlu dirombak sama sekali.

Saya menyeru Datuk Mustapa sebagai Menteri yang bertanggungjawab untuk:

1. Mengumumkan sepenuhnya penerima 1.5 bilion saham khas Bumiputra yang diagihkan dalam tahun 2010

2. Mengumumkan rombakan mekanisme dan penambahbaikan kepada sistem agihan dan pemantauan saham khas Bumiputra untuk mengelakkan penyelewengan yang mengakibatkan kehilangan RM52 bilion saham Bumiputra tidak berulang

Saya akan membawa perkara ini dalam sidang Dewan Rakyat yang akan datang untuk memastikan ketelusan dan pertanggungjawaban pihak-pihak yang terbabit.

Parti Keadilan Rakyat percaya bahawa teras pengupayaan ekonomi Bumiputra perlu beralih dari kegilaan mencapai sasaran 30% ekuiti kepada fokus untuk meningkatkan pendapatan isi rumah keluarga Bumiputra. Mereka membentuk 75% daripada anggaran 11 juta rakyat termiskin di negara ini yang hanya mendapat pendapatan bulanan purata sebanyak RM1,500 sebulan sahaja.

Kegilaan dengan 30% sasaran ekuiti seperti yang dimainkan Umno/BN tidak akan berjaya menangani kemelut ekonomi rakyat terbanyak Bumiputra dan akan terus disalahgunakan oleh golongan elit pemerintah dan niagawan.

SAIFUDDIN NASUTION ISMAIL
SETIAUSAHA AGONG
22 FEBRUARI 2011

===

TRANSPARENCY IN DISTRIBUTION OF SPECIAL BUMIPUTRA SHARES

Parti Keadilan Rakyat would like to attract the public's attention to the recent announcement by the International Trade and Industry Minister Datuk Seri Mustapa Mohamad on the distribution of special bumiputra shares through initial public offerings.

Datuk Seri Mustapa claimed that the Umno/BN government had managed to notch the Bumiputra's equity ownership of corporate sector to 22% partly through the distribution of special Bumiputra shares administered by his ministry.

It is peculiar that Umno/BN government seems to want to take the credit for supposedly increasing the Bumiputra's equity ownership to only 22% in 2011 when it has miserably failed to achieve the 30% target set for 1990. After 21 years and billions' worth of mismanagement and abuses made in the name of the Malays and Bumiputra, UMNO/BN is willing to take credit for any incremental increase in Bumiputra's equity ownership despite the obvious failure over the 21 years.

However, our real concern is on the management of the share distribution considering the same practice had resulted the loss of RM52 billion out of the RM54 billion of shares distributed to Bumiputras under the scheme, as admitted by the Prime Minister.

In 2010 alone, 1.5 billion of shares from 18 IPOs were distributed to supposedly Bumiputra investors. 2010 also featured some of the biggest IPOs of late, including Petronas Chemical Group Berhad's IPO at issue price of RM5.05 per share and Malaysian Marine and Heavy Engineering Holding Berhad's IPO at issue price of RM3.61 per share. If a significant portion of the 1.5 billion shares distributed by the ministry came from these two Petronas-related groups, there would have been shares valued at a few billion ringgit distributed to investors.

This is the same mechanism that had failed the society and cultivated the culture of political patronage seeking for easy access to shares under the guise of meeting the 30% Bumiputra target. In the end, the billions worth of shares distributed were quickly disposed to create a Malay ruling elite with immense wealth at the expense of the Malay masses.

Therefore, the same mechanism that had caused the loss of RM52 billion worth of shares allotted to Bumiputra in the name of achieving the 30% equity ownership target must be totally revamped.

I call upon the Minister to:

3. Fully disclose the recipients of the 1.5 billion shares allocated in 2010 under the special Bumiputra share distribution scheme

4. Announce to the public improvements made to the mechanism for distribution and tracking of the shares to ensure the same abuse that had caused the loss of RM52 billion worth of Bumiputra shares is not repeated

I will pursue this matter in the next Dewan Rakyat session to ensure full transparency and accountability of the scheme.

In the end, Parti Keadilan Rakyat believes that the thrust of Bumiputra economic empowerment must move away from the obsession for the 30% equity ownership target towards a focus on elevating the household income of the Bumiputra families. They make up 75% of the estimated 11 million poorest rakyat whose monthly average household income is only RM1,500 per month.

The obsession with 30% equity ownership for Bumiputra will not be able to address the economic woes of the poorest of the Bumiputras.

SAIFUDDIN NASUTION ISMAIL
SECRETARY GENERAL
22 FEBRUARY 2011

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