“Not surprising,” the Rembau MP tweeted today in response to the en masse resignation of Khazanah’s board of directors.
“Apparently (the) prime minister has yet to even grant (Khazanah’s) managing director an appointment at the office.”
The nine Khazanah directors, as well as its managing director Azman Mokhtar and executive committee chairman Nor Md Yusof, resigned on Tuesday.
It comes weeks after Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad criticised Khazanah for deviating from its initial purpose of helping Bumiputeras.
Khazanah later responded by saying it would seek clarification from Putrajaya on its future mandate.
Khairy said Khazanah had become a different entity from what it was during Mahathir’s previous tenure as prime minister.
He said its role as a strategic investment arm of the government must continue.
“Khazanah recruited the best and brightest Malaysians to do this (making investments that benefited the nation). It would be a shame to dismantle everything that has been built only to replace it with the business model of the 1990s.
“My fear is that government-linked companies (GLCs) will be broken up and flogged off to a new set of 1990-esque businessmen. We all know how that ended,” Khairy said.
Khazanah was established in 1993 to manage commercial assets owned by the federal government and to undertake strategic investments.
Khairy said even with upcoming changes to the system as a whole, he hoped the present GLC model would still be implemented by the new government as their transformation stories were “successes”.
“(It) needs tweaks for sure,” Khairy agreed. “For instance, GLCs have (in some sectors) crowded out private business.
“This was a long-standing issue. That was probably the spirit of the PM’s comments that GLCs had deviated from (the) Bumiputera agenda.”
Academic: Say no to politicians leading GLCs, statutory bodies