Azmi Khalid, who in 2010 chaired the bi-partisan Public Accounts Committee (PAC) when it inquired about discrepancies in PTPTN’s accounts, admitted that the fund had difficulties collecting money from borrowers.
“Some students paid but there was no record who paid, or how much balance they had to pay, no complete records,” Azmi, a former home minister, told FMT.
“This made it difficult for PTPTN to collect money,” he said.
He said the government had then informed PAC that it had hired Prokhas Sdn Bhd, a company owned by the Ministry of Finance, to address the problem.
“I don’t know if they solved the problem, but if what Wan Saiful says is true, it looks like the issue still hasn’t been resolved.”
Wan Saiful recently revealed shocking instances of mismanagement and high debt plaguing PTPTN, which is among government agencies being scrutinised by the Pakatan Harapan government as part of its 10 key promises of reforms.
“They didn’t care at all about maintaining a reliable database. This means I don’t know the incomes of the borrowers. When this data is missing, how can I decide which borrower can defer and who should continue paying? So I had to collect data first,” he said in an interview with FMT.
Meanwhile, Wan Saiful hit back at former higher education minister Idris Jusoh for defending the previous administration’s management of PTPTN.
Idris had questioned PH’s promise to allow borrowers earning less than RM4,000 a month to defer their loan repayment as a ploy to win the general election.
Wan Saiful said there was no intention on the part of the Umno-led government to recover billions of dollars in debt.
“If they had wanted to collect PTPTN debts, why didn’t they bother to update their database?” asked the former chief of think tank Institute for Democracy and Economic Affairs.
“As the higher education minister, was he aware as to how big the debt was? If he did, did he realise that PTPTN’s debts were second only to 1MDB’s losses?”
Wan Saiful said the debt situation in PTPTN was such that he was forced to approve more requests for cash injection from the government.
“Within a week of coming into office, I had to sign papers to allow PTPTN to borrow another RM3 billion so that we do no close shop. Is this being responsible?”
It was reported last year that some 410,500 borrowers owed PTPTN RM6.84 billion.
The amount included RM2.84 billion from borrowers who had never paid a single sen to PTPTN since the fund was started in 1997.