It was previously considered to be a natural succession plan from within the organisation with one of two senior ranking officers eventually taking over from managing director Azman Mokhtar.
However, these well-connected individuals are now being talked up as being potential successors to Azman, who took up the post in 2004 and is set to retire in May 2019.
According to the report, this turn of events has especially come about following the departure of Khazanah’s former deputy chairman, Nor Mohamed Yackop.
Nor Mohamed resigned from Khazanah on Sept 30, in what was seen as the consequence of his testimony at the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Bank Negara Malaysia’s (BNM) losses due to foreign exchange trading in the early 1990s.
In August, he had testified that he was accountable for the forex losses, said to be in the region of RM30.5 billion.
“There is no denying my accountability for the forex losses. I accepted my fair share of the responsibility and resigned from BNM,” he had said while also absolving then prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad and then finance minister Anwar Ibrahim, both leading opposition figures now, of any blame.
Nor Mohamed was said to have been firmly behind the succession-from-within plan but his leaving the sovereign wealth fund has opened the doors for non-Khazanah people to vie for the influential position.
According to the Singapore daily, the original plan had been for one of the two current executive directors – Hisham Hamdan and Ahmad Zulkarnain Onn – to shadow Azman for a year as deputy managing director, before the promotion to managing director is approved by the Khazanah board.
However, they are said to be facing competition from two prominent chief executive officers, namely CIMB Bank group CEO Tengku Zafrul Aziz and 1MDB president and CEO Arul Kanda Kandasamy, according to sources in Khazanah and the government.
The role of Khazanah as the government’s most important investment vehicle cannot be underestimated, with the fund having control of major local corporations, including CIMB, Telekom Malaysia, Tenaga Nasional and IHH Healthcare.
According to ST, Prime Minister Najib Razak, as chairman of Khazanah, would ultimately have the final say on who takes over from Azman.