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Friday, June 9, 2017

MACC starts probe on Felda Global Ventures Holdings Bhd (FGV)




PUTRAJAYA: The Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission has begun its investigation into alleged im­­proprieties involving Felda Global Ventures Holdings Bhd (FGV), a day after its group president and CEO Datuk Zakaria Arshad was told to take an indefinite leave of absence.

The MACC took a statement from Zakaria, who was called to its headquarters here yesterday.

The commission’s next move will be to send investigators to FGV headquarters in Kuala Lumpur to “see what they can find” and determine if there is a case.

Zakaria, 57, arrived at the MACC headquarters at 2.20pm alone, with no lawyers or associates accompanying him.

He brought along a stack of files, which he claimed were documents on FGV.

Zakaria looked calm when he arrived and maintained the same demeanour when he left some four hours later.

“The MACC asked me to come today. I’m also here to hand over some documents to them,” he told reporters, adding that his session was not over.

“I will be called again to give my statement, and I will give my full co-operation.”

MACC deputy chief commis­sioner Datuk Azam Baki told The Star: “We will go through his statement and will decide what to do next.”

Azam also confirmed that anti-graft investigators would go to FGV headquarters at 10am today to get hold of more documents.

On Tuesday, Zakaria and three other FGV officers were asked to take a leave of absence, which chairman Tan Sri Mohd Isa Abdul Samad said was a decision made by the board.

The other three are FGV chief financial officer Ahmad Tifli Mohd Talha, FGV Trading CEO Ahmad Salman Omar and Delima Oil Products senior general manager Kamarzaman Abd Karim.

The board’s decision came a day after Zakaria was told to resign by Isa following a series of board meetings since May 31 concerning delayed payments owed to Delima Oil Products Sdn Bhd by Safitex Trading LLC, an Afghan company with an array of businesses and headquartered in Du­­bai.

Zakaria subsequently urged the MACC to investigate allegations of improprieties in FGV and asked the commission to probe the parties behind the contracts.

Sources: The Star  by mazwin nik anis, he mananthini sivanandam, syed azhar


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'Future richest man' nabbed: greed not paying for Zhang



Facing action: Zhang being taken into custody by police after arriving in China.

Zhang arrested in Indonesia and escorted back to China


PETALING JAYA: Self-proclaimed “future richest man in the world” Zhang Jian was arrested in Indonesia and escorted back to China where he will face legal action.

Zhang, whose real name is Song Miqiu, is believed to be the mastermind behind several get-rich-quick schemes in China, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia.

The www.ysmwxb.com website of Wu Xin Bi – Zhang’s latest “coin” venture – is now inaccessible and over 5,000 Malaysians with RM17.5mil invested are now left in the lurch, reported Oriental Daily.

Sin Chew Daily reported that according to mainland Chinese media, Chinese police tracked Zhang down with help from their Indonesian counterparts and the Chinese Embassy in the country.

He was brought back to China yesterday.

Chinese police investigations revealed that Zhang had set up a trading company called Yun Shu Mao with other partners in November 2012 as a front for illegal multi-level marketing schemes, involving up to 600mil yuan (RM376.63mil).

Police in China’s Hunan province began investigating Zhang and his partners in December 2013, reported Sin Chew.

Zhang immediately fled the country but continued his illegal activities in South-East Asia.

He made headlines in the Malaysian media in 2014 when billboards of him appeared in Penang, proclaiming him to be the “future richest man in the world”.

He also awarded his lucky “distributors” with luxury cars.

The country’s Domestic Trade, Cooperatives and Consumerism Ministry then launched an investigation into Zhang’s company but he fled to Thailand.

On Oct 27, 2014, Thai police arrested Zhang, his wife Yoyo Wang Wen Fang, 29, and his right-hand man Geng Lian Bao over a pyramid scheme and seized assets worth 240mil baht (RM30mil).

After Zhang’s release in 2016, some supporters claimed that he remained in Thailand but his actual whereabouts then were a mystery.

Chinese police sent their officials to track him down several times and even issued an Interpol red alert on Zhang in March 2016.

They also sought cooperation from police in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia to investigate Zhang’s activities.

Recently, Zhang was seen making a comeback in Malaysia to promote Wu Xin Bi, a coin which he claimed had investment value on the Internet. - The Star

End of the road: Zhang being taken away by the police in China >>

 

Greed not paying for Zhang

 

The ‘future richest man in the world’ – the alleged mastermind behind several get-rich-quick schemes in the region – is set to face legal action in China.


ZHANG Jian, founder of money game scheme YSLM and the self proclaimed “future richest man in the world”, was arrested in Indonesia, finally.

Zhang has enjoyed a demigod status among his followers ever since he first started the business. He was uplifted as an ultra-smart man who went to the university at the age of nine and decoded bank passwords at 12. He was also said to be well versed in six languages.

But the question is whether he is no better than a master con man.

Zhang is well known in Malaysia, and the YSLM that made a landfall in this country three years ago almost turned the country upside down.

In the pretext of charity, he and his team made generous donations to local Chinese primary schools and independent high schools to win the hearts of the public and for their own publicity. He once offered RM350,000 to a single Chinese primary school in Negri Sembilan.

Zhang and his team recently brought a virtual currency called wuxingbi into Malaysia, and in the name of Zhang Jian Jewelry, continued with its donating spree that subsequently triggered the controversial question whether his donation should be accepted by independent Chinese high schools in the country.

After his release from a Phuket prison, Zhang went on with his usual tactic of bribing government officials and counterfeiting identification documents to move around South-East Asia. That nevertheless would not stop him from running his money game business by manipulating the wuxingbi scam through WeChat, smartphone and the Internet while staying largely out of the public eye.

His YSLM has sucked up 600mil yuan (RM380mil) of public funds in China, while his wuxingbi is actually another virtual coin scheme operating on a people-get-people model.

He knew how to command public attention, spending 30,000 yuan (RM18,834) each on young women to get them to shave their heads and act like nuns to promote wuxingbi at various functions and events. He even organised a “nun wedding party” in China.

He promised anyone purchasing a 5,000 yuan (RM3,139) wuxingbi to bag in 4mil yuan (RM2.5mil) of returns within a year. The unimaginable 800-fold returns were way higher than what recently collapsed money game schemes could think of offering their investors. Unfortunately, many have chosen to believe in him, especially in China.

Even as money games has become so rampant in this country, our enforcement authorities appear to be always a few steps behind in their actions.

Extensive coverage in Sin Chew Daily has doubtlessly killed the get-rich dreams of many avid investors. These scammers are never short of cash, and are always ready to hire well-known law firms to send us legal letters in an attempt to gag the media.

With Zhang now escorted back to China to face legal action, perhaps it is time for wuxingbi investors here to wake up. — Sin Chew Daily/Asia News Network

Source: The Star by Pook Ah Lek

Pook Ah Lek is Editorial Director with Sin Chew Daily. The views expressed here are entirely the writer’s own.

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Tuesday, June 6, 2017

Arrest decline in productivity and competitiveness in Malaysia



COINCIDENTLY, two major reports were released on June 1 on the decline of our national productivity and competitiveness. The first was our own Productivity Report 2016/2017, which was launched by Minister of International Trade and Industry Datuk Seri Mustapa Mohamad (pic) and the second one was the World Competitiveness Yearbook WCY issued by the Institute for Management Development.

This coincidence in decline is understandable since both productivity and competitiveness are closely inter-related. Lower productivity leads to lower international competitiveness.

Productivity

Our labour productivity fell short of our 11th Plan target of 3.7% growth by 0.2% to 3.5% last year. This is a small decline and has been rightly explained with confidence by the Minister of Trade in positive terms when he said that Malaysia was “on track”.

I think he will agree that we must be concerned enough to ask what are the causes and whether this is just a mere slip or could it be the beginning of a trend.

We have to take this fall as a wake up call, in case this decline happens again next year and later on. We have to review many recurrent and uncomfortable issues like brain drain and unemployed graduates - who could number over 200,000 - also reflect the low productivity of many graduates who are newly employed. The lower productivity can be attributed to our low use of automation, high employment of unskilled foreign and cheap labour and the new challenges of the digital economy.

The Minister’s proposal for the Government and private sector to “join forces to embark on initiatives” to improve productivity in nine sectors “of lower productivity”, is most welcome. The private sector has to make profit unlike the Government. Hence it has a greater sense of urgency in wanting to improve not only labour productivity but productivity from all factors of production, including good governance and integrity and quality services to the public. Thus it will be very interesting for the public to be made fully aware of the productivity improvements that should materialise not only in the private sector, but for the Government as well. For instance government departments can learn from the private sector how to provide better or excellent services in the fields of health and education and counter services at police stations, Customs, Immigration, etc .

Productivity in both the private sector and the government machinery should improve to raise our total national productivity. Only then will our nation be able to compete much more efficiently and effectively in the global economy.

We can have the best Productivity Blueprint like that which was launched on May 8 but our productivity can continue to slip and even slide, if we do not ensure that the blueprint is fully implemented and its progress diligently monitored and improved along the way. One way to seriously pursue our goal to raise productivity would be to increase the small sum of only RM200mil for a new Automation Fund. Modern machinery and equipment are expensive but the returns in terms of higher productivity can be very significant. So let’s go for higher productivity with greater automation and not approach the challenge on an ad hoc and piecemeal basis. The Treasury would need to support the Productivity Blueprint much more productively!

Competitiveness


Malaysia registered its lowest ranking in five years in the WCY.

This reflects our decline in productivity as competitiveness is the other side of the coin. However, I am surprised that the relationship is so sensitive. Just a drop of 0.2% in productivity can cause a drop in our international competitiveness ranking from 19th place to the 24th!

What this could show is that while we are sluggish in our productivity, other countries are much more aggressive in improving both their productivity and competitiveness.

There is thus no point in taking pride that we scored better in our ranking compared to the industrial countries like Austria (25th) Japan (26th) and Korea (29th). They are highly developed countries which enjoy much higher standards of living and a better quality of life that we do. They have reached the top of Mount Fuji and other mountains, while we are still climbing up from a lower economic base.

The drop in our competitiveness is significant and we have to take this decline very seriously. Malaysia slipped in all four sectors, that is, economic performance, business efficiency, government efficiency and infrastructure. That is why it is essential to investigate in depth into all these major falls in performance and tell the public what is being done to improve our rankings and ratings.

It is appreciated that Malaysia Productivity Corp’s Director General Datuk Mohd Razali Hussain has established Nine Working Cluster Groups to examine these poor indicators and report on improvements that must be made expeditiously.

Conclusion

It is good that we have these reports on productivity and international competitiveness to benchmark our national performance against them. We have to take advantage of these annual indicators and ensure that we keep improving rather than falling in productivity and competitiveness .

Our efforts to improve will be watched closely by our domestic and particularly international investors and international competitors .

We can only hope that these declines are not just coincidental but are also not developing declining trends. This could spell pessimism and falling confidence in our socio-economic management.

Instead we should take these set backs as warning signals and rededicate ourselves to a greater commitment to higher competition, more meritocracy and building a better socio-economic and political environment in Malaysia.

TAN SRI RAMON NAVARATNAM

Chairman Asli’s Centre of Public Policy Studies

Related links:  

Launching of Productivity Report 2016/2017 - Ministry of International ...

 

World Competitiveness Rankings - IMD

 

Fix election processes before GE14

 

CM may have too much on his plate - Nation | The Star Online

 


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