Teh Yik Koon said the culprits in the BMF affair, in which billions of dollars in bad loans were given to numerous Hong Kong property speculators, employed similar strategies found in other scandals throughout the years, including 1MDB.
“The rot has seeped into our everyday lives,” she said at the launch of her book “From BMF to 1MDB” today.
“We as the people have lost billions, if not trillions, from these financial scandals,” said Teh, a criminologist who did a doctoral study on the BMF scandal.
The BMF issue made headlines in the early 1980s, after it was revealed that the Bank Bumiputra subsidiary in Hong Kong had provided “bad” loans to several shady companies.
Hundreds of millions of dollars were lost when the Carrian group which was given the loans collapsed in 1983.
Speaking at a panel discussion on the book, activist Cynthia Gabriel, who heads the Centre to Combat Corruption and Cronyism (C4), agreed that the BMF and 1MDB affairs had many similarities.
Both involved controversial domestic and foreign incidents that caught international attention, she said.
She said both involved loans processed without proper approvals, with official task forces whose reports could not be debated in Parliament.
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