Azalina said the claimants’ strategy was to target commercial assets like Petronas, adding that “they have tried everything” and were now targeting other assets involving Malaysia.
She cited Boustead Shipping and Malaysia Airlines as examples of the companies that could be the next targets.
“They feel they can ‘disturb’ Malaysian assets. (Boustead Shipping and Malaysia Airlines) are just examples. Any (company) can be a target,” she said. “We need to be very, very alert about this.”
Azalina made the comments during a briefing for MPs in Parliament today on the dispute.
It was recently reported that court bailiffs in Luxembourg had issued fresh seizure orders against two units of Petronas, following a bid by descendants of the former sultanate to enforce a US$15 billion (RM66 billion) award they had won against Malaysia.
The award was granted to them by a French arbitration court last year.
The Petronas Azerbaijan (Shah Deniz) and Petronas South Caucasus units were first seized in July 2022, but the government said last month the order had been set aside by a Luxembourg district court.
On Tuesday, Luxembourg court bailiffs issued a second seizure order on the units and related bank accounts, court documents shared by the heirs’ lawyer, Paul Cohen, showed.
Azalina described the attempted seizure of the assets as “commercial piracy”, with the claimants using commercial means to “commit piracy against Malaysia”.
In February 2022, a French arbitration court instructed Putrajaya to pay US$14.92 billion (RM62.59 billion) to the descendants of the last sultan of Sulu.
The arbitrator, Gonzalo Stampa, ruled that Malaysia had violated the 1878 agreements between the old Sulu kingdom in the Philippines and a representative of the British North Borneo Company that used to administer what is now Sabah.
The arbitration process originated in Spain but was moved to Paris.
Under the 1878 agreements, the then sultan of Sulu ceded sovereignty over large parts of Sabah to the then maharaja of Sabah and the British North Borneo Company’s Alfred Dent, who agreed that they and their future heirs were to pay the heirs of the sultan 5,000 Mexican dollars annually.
In 1936, the last formally recognised sultan of Sulu, Jamalul Kiram II, died without heirs. Payments temporarily ceased until North Borneo High Court Chief Justice Charles F Macaskie named nine court-appointed heirs in 1939.
Though Malaysia took over these payments when it became the successor of the agreement following Sabah’s independence and Malaysia’s formation in 1963, these payments – equivalent to RM5,300 a year – ceased in 2013 after an incursion by armed men into Lahad Datu, along the eastern coast of Sabah.
Azalina revealed that one of the eight claimants is a cousin of one of the eight Filipino men who have been sentenced to death for waging war against the Yang di-Pertuan Agong in relation to the Lahad Datu intrusion. The men are currently being held at Taiping prison.
She said that as opposed to blaming the self-proclaimed heirs of the last sultan of Sulu, the “biggest culprit” is the team backing the claimants.
Last October, The Edge Markets reported that Therium, one of the world’s largest litigation funding firms, had bankrolled the Sulu claimants’ dispute to the tune of US$10 million.
“They (claimants) won’t have the money (otherwise), meaning, someone was behind them,” Azalina said.
“The timing was because the government had changed. When they saw the country was shaken because of political unrest, they took action. They’re not stupid.”