“I really don’t want to overstay,” he said in a report by The Malaysian Reserve (TMR).
“My contract ends on May 31, 2019. Best practice is to announce leadership line-up six months in advance.
“The board, which is chaired by the prime minister, will sit at the end of the year to look at the matter, thus, by January next year, we will know who will be in charge.”
Azman has been Khazanah managing director since 2004. He is also the co-founder and former managing director of BinaFikir Sdn Bhd, and was previously director and head of research at Salomon Smith Barney and Union Bank of Switzerland in Malaysia.
Last November, reports said “well-connected individuals” were in the running to take over from Azman, 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.
According to The Straits Times, the original plan was 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 CEOs, namely CIMB Bank group CEO Tengku Zafrul Aziz and 1MDB president and CEO Arul Kanda Kandasamy, according to sources in Khazanah and the government.