Few in Malaysia would miss a chance to be in the good books of the politically powerful. Especially if it means they could be wealthy in the bargain. But they will almost lose their magic when a new prime minister takes over. It does not matter to them that others who followed this route in the past are forgotten now. They do not realise, or their spin meisters forget to tell them, they should complete their legal actions when their patron is prime minister. If I were to say today that Tan Sri Vincent is powerful under Pak Lah, I would be laughed at. And rightly so. The legal action Tan Sri Vincent brought against me still awaits a hearing in the Federal Court 12 years later, contrary to what he and his lawyer said then. But the case is stuck in the Federal Court , certainly longer than it has taken to issue the writ by stealth to the Court of Appeal decision. Tan Sri Ting Pek Khiing did not proceed with his action in Miri in Sarawak after the initial steps, perverting justice in the process, and putting me to unnecessary and great expense. He is now in Kuching, ill and cannot move about though he makes his appearance daily at his new business venture. He is forgotten in Malaysia, his Ekran Bhd, which once was traded at more than 100 ringgit, is now a penny stock, as Tan Sri Vincent's Berjaya stock, which followed Ekran's route, is. It would be a foolhardy investor who bought either share on the stock market as investment.

Over the years, MPs were kept in the dark, and when they asked questions, they were threatened with defamation suits. The National Front got its favourite business men to silence the journalists. Tan Sri Vincent Tan took me to court, and on a serious of moves which showed that he gets the judges he wants, won all the way to the federal court. By then he was out, the I was given a rehearing of the Federal Court on the grounds that the Chief Justice had gone on a holiday with the lawyer for Tan Sri Vincent Tan. This was followed by Tan Sri Ting Pek Khiing of Ekran, who sued me in Miri and I have to go there to file. Both are friends of the former prime minister, Tun Mahathir Mohamed. Tan Sri Ting's case did not go any further after he could not justitify his claim as events caught up with them, is now out of the corporate scene, a diabetic in Singapore. Tan Sri Vincent is ignored by the prime minister's friends now, and his flagship, Berjaya Corporation, owes RM800 million, most to its subsidiary. Defamation action will succeed, in Malaysia and Singapore, is it is quickly settled. The National Kidney Foundation in Singapore sued any one who said it was spending unnecessary money, but according to a government-appointed firm of accounts, it seems it did. But the National Kidney Foundation is in trouble, and the newspapers there go to town, because the PAP wants to bring down a popular politician.

The usual hype follows: the series is called, ungrammatically, "Coin in Education", is "deemed perfect" for its purpose, is touted as a first step to coin collecting, features twelve endangered animals, and released monthly. How much does this 25 sen coin cost a child wanting to collect it or, implausibly, so he could become an entrepreneur? Oh, only RM5 a month. Why not 25 sen a month? Of course, if the schools join in the scam, there is a discount for bulk orders, says the scam's sales and marketing director, Ms Hashimah Hashim. There will be an annual theme: flora, sea animals, wonders of the world. With a few million children in schools, what kind of response does it expect? Well, 33,000 coins. How does the "entrepreneurial spirit" come into it? As she explains it, if one child misses a few coins in collection, he would buy it at a higher price or exchange it from another in his collection. "This is where the hobby will prove fruitful," Ms Hashimah gushes. Besides the value of the coins would appreciate in time. No doubt as firmly as the share prices of Renong, UEM, Ekran, Berjaya and other discarded playthings of establishement cronies!

What should be important is not funny pieces of paper we are over the years forced to sign -- the Rukun Negara; Leadership by Example; the Clean, Efficient and Trustworthy campaign, to name just three, and extinct as the dodo -- but the social contract the BN promised in its elections campaigns. That it jettisons the moment it is returned, insist it could do as it liked, without Parliamentary oversight, cheerfully leading the country in bankruptcy, but any who challenges it are traitors. So the cronies of the establishment makes hay and the people pay for it. The debris and detritus of this -- MAS, MBSB, Renong, UEM, Berjaya, Ekran, Perwaja, the Bakun Dam, the privatised highways, the building of Putra Jaya, KLIA, the F-1 motor racing circuit, to name a few -- amplifies the BN government's disdain for its own election promises of a fair deal for Malaysians.

This is the political fallout from a necessary policy that lost its way for which Dr Mahathir is as responsible as any. He attacks it now for a different purpose. He wants to bring in Chinese business men, who he believes would deliver with more panache and efficiency. Yet, what was to be the largest engineering project, the RM13 billion Bakun hydroelectric dam, was given to a property company, Ekran Bhd, controlled by a Chinese crony, Tan Sri Ting Pek Khiing; they made a mess of it. He and Ekran are let off the hook, given RM800 million for failing, now gets a major engineering project for the Sepanga Bay for several hundred million ringgit. Why?

The RM350 million Miri Port Authority is incensed. The while elephant is built, like so many projects, for no reason than to tell the world it has one. Like the Kuantan Port, a white elephant the moment it opened its doors in the 1970s, it is built for some crony to make money. If it works, it is an incidental benefit. We know what happened to the Bakun Hydroelectric Dam project, for the failure of which one Tan Sri Dato' Paduka Dr Ting Pek Khiing and his property company, Ekran Berhad, got RM800 million; and is now given a contract worth about RM150 million for the anciliary works for the naval base in Sabah. Ekran say it is for the naval base itself; it lied. Besides, if the Sepanga naval base, with the most modern submarine facilities, can be built for far less than it cost to build Miri Port, then even sampans could not land in there safely. The naval base will in fact cost more than RM1 billion. Even that could be an underestimate.

Ekran Berhad published the following announcement in the Star about what its beloved chairman, Tan Sri Dato' Paduka (Dr) Ting Pek Khiing aka Tan Sri Dato' Paduka (Dr) Candonodam Ting, about his inability to pay an initial installment of seven per cent of loans he took from the company. This advertisement appears on page 38 of the Star of 17 January 01:

The Chinese business men press-ganged are handpicked not for their ability but for their lack of it. So, Tan Sri Ting Pek Khiing, a former tractor driver, and his Ekran empire keeps going with projects which prove their incompetence: after making a mess of the Bakun hydroelectrice project, he is given another chance to build it; besides, he also gets an important subcontract for the submarine base at Sepanga Bay in Sabah. The former car salesman and insurance agent, Tan Sri Vincent Tan, cannot rise from his inability to run companies and businesses without fresh infusions of government projects.

There was confident predictions of Ekran's rebound when RM700 million of the RM1,000 million management fee would be paid it for work not done over the Bakun project. The prime minister, Dato' Seri Mahathir Mohamed, insists that it be paid; the deputy prime minister, Dato' Seri Anwar Ibrahim, wants that assessed on work done, backed by receipts, and set off against any income derived from the "biomass removal" of which Ekran's ebullient Can-Do boss, Tan Sri Dato' Seri Ting Pek Khiing, once said he was not interested in. (Now, his lifeline depends on that.) Since the project has collapsed, perhaps irretrievably, helped in large measure by his own, and his company's incompetence, the government deferred the project. Dato' Seri Anwar has indicated that if it would ever be restored , it would be a long, long while away. But his tone indicated that Bakun is as good as dead.

The forced sell-down of companies controlled by once-favoured business man, Tan Sri Dato' Dr Ting Pek Khiing, continued on the Kuala Lumpur yesterday. The star counter, Ekran Bhd, which was to have been the project manager for the now doomed Bakun Hydroelectric Dam project, touched a new low at RM0.69 before recovering slightly to RM0.715 at the close, or more than 40 per cent lower than the previous closing.

The market is abuzz with talk that Ekran Berhad would be paid RM700 million for not building the Bakun hydroelectric dam. The sum is said to have been approved, although no confirmation of this is possible. The high quality timber in one of Sarawak's best timber areas which Ekran Berhad got by executive fiat -- by allowing it to clear the area not of timber but biomass. There is pressure within the government that this RM700 million should be offset against the value of the timber extracted, but as matters stand that would be a pipe dream. Whether this would prevent the wolves from gathering at Ekran's door is, of course, another matter. It shares are suspended, and if recent trends are any guide, the already depressed shares should drop like a stone.

Despite deputy prime minister Dato' Seri Anwar Ibrahim's insistence, the MOF Inc's takeover of the Bakun hydroelectric project from the floundering Ekran Berhad is a bail out. Whether the Bakun dam is a national or international project is irrelevant. When Ekran Berhad was given it before the Sarawak state elections, the decision was taken by two men, the prime minister Dato' Seri Mahathir Mohamed and the financial adviser Tun Daim Zainuddin. One reason for this was the growing disenchantment among the Chinese community in Sarawak with the government, and giving such a large project to a Sarawak Chinese would have swung votes towards the government, as it did. There were other financial conditions attached to this, mainly as a way for Tan Sri Dr Ting Pek Khiing to be paid for his "can do" buildings he built in a hurry in Langkawi and for extending the runaway there to take in Boeing 747s. That did not have Khazanah approval, since it was given in the usual Bolehland way of a prime ministerial directive.

The ABB-CBPO consortium, sitting on massive losses, is so sanguine that one cannot but believe it has much up its sleeve. Tan Sri Dato Dr Ting is certainly cornered, despite the bold front he puts up. He has had a recurrence of the stroke he suffers from within a fortnight of being sued by two directors of Wembley Industries Holdings Berhad for RM83 million. As I see it, it is a convenient time for him to give up the ghost of Bakun. Since the International Finance Corporation (IFC), a subsidiary of the World Bank, seem willing to finance the dam at market rates of interest, new Bolehland institutions will move to take that up. The current front runners are a consortium led by that great nodding marionette, Tan Sri Francis Yeoh: YTL, Tabung Haji, Siemens and Alcatel. My information is that Tan Sri Dr Ting would depart from the scene with control of Granite, the listed company that allegedly has a billion ringgit contract in Ekran Berhad's scheme for the Bakun dam, and little else.

This problem over Bakun becomes curiouser and curiouser. Now Tenaga Nasional Berhad, with no experience in building hydroelectric dams of any kind, now wants to build the Bakun dam after its main proponent, Ekran Berhad, abrogated its contract with the ABB-CBPO consortium. The Star quoted industry officials as saying that for TNB, if it succeeds, it could be the biggest project for its subsidiary, TNB Engineers Sdn Bhd, "which has 300 engineers specialising in planning hydro stations, generation, transmission and distribution". (How do you "plan" hydro stations, when you have had no chance to put them into practice, but never mind.)

The severity of Malaysia's financial crunch forced the prime minister, Dato' Seri Mahathir Mohamed, to "delay indefinitely" -- in every day terms, cancel -- the Bakun dam and several mega projects. Ekran Bhd, whose once-ebullient executive chairman insists upon a proprietary right to the "national project" that is Bakun, dismissed the Swiss-Swedish-Brazilian consortium, ABB-CBPO, as its main contractor after signing the formal contract, and was in negotiations with Dumez, the French construction giant, to replace it when the Mahathir bombshell fell two days ago. Yesterday, the prime minister backtracked to say that Ekran can find a new partner if it could. At the same time, despite Dr Mahathir's continuing insistence of Bakun as a "national project", the government clearly is distancing itself from Ekran, if not the dam itself.

The Malaysian Government cancelled the Bakun hydroelectric dam project less than a day after Ekran Berhad vitiated its agreement with the Swiss-Swedish-Brazilian consortium, ABB-CBPO, to construct it. Also cancelled -- "delayed indefinitely", in bureaucratese -- were the Linear City project which Tan Sri Vincent Tan was to have developed, and some major highway projects. The announcement came amidst a further meltdown on the Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange and the UMNO General Assembly. The government, which had ordered stocks on the Composite Index to immediate delivery before buying or selling it earlier this week, has also withdrawn it. The UMNO General Assembly, which begins this morning, is out for blood, since there is hardly a divisional leader who has not lost at least heavily on the stock market. The decline of the currency to 3.04 against the US dollar has made the overall look uncertain. The government has also promised action against local short sellers, amongst whom are reportedly those among the high and mighty of the Malaysian financial scene.

The deputy prime minister, Dato' Anwar Ibrahim, recently ordered Ekran Berhad and the main Bakun contractor, ABB-CBPO, to sort out their differences over the Bakun project. The Ekran Berhad executive chairman, Tan Sri Ting Pek Khiing, immediately responded to say there was no problem. ABB-CBPO kept quiet publicly but told anyone who asked that there was indeed a problem. Dato' Seri Anwar says there is and major enough to give the two an ultimatum to resolve the issue. (But then, who is he? He is only the deputy prime minister, not the top honcho himself.) The two parties met this week, and suddenly the problem was there all the time. Tan Sri Ting insists, echoing the prime minister's statement that a project of this size would inevitably give rise to differences and problems, now there is a "minor" problem which six hours of negotiations could not erase. To emphasise this, the Bakun Hydroelectric company held a board meeting before and after their negotiations with the ABB-CBPO consortium.

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