THE PRIME MINISTER, DATO' SERI MAHATHIR Mohamed, broke official silence at last over Pahang's second casino. He revoked the gaming licence is revoked because the concessionaire, his super-crony, Tan Sri Vincent Tan, breached the conditions. "The machines are supposed to be for the club, not for public use, he said. Normally when clubs breach the conditions of the gaming licence, they is charged in court as well. Would this super crony be treated as harshly? If not, why not? Only slot machinese (one-armed bandits) were allowed, so and to recover the cost of the pseudo-French resort built to resemble the French town of Colmer. Dr Mahathir wanted it,

THE MENTRI BESAR OF PAHANG, DATO' Seri Adnan Yaakob, was so hurt by the grant of a second casino licence in his state that he complained about it to the Prime Minister, Dato' Seri Mahathir Mohamed. It would redound on Pahang UMNO, he warned, to ward off a determined challenge from PAS. I had, in my last column in the PAS newspaper, Harakah, written of it under the heading: Pahang Darul Kasino. The licence was issued to that super-crony, Tan Sri Vincent Tan, last seen riding a horse with one Dr Mahathir Mohamed. It caused a furore in UMNO as its leaders rushed for cover. Dr Mahathir, on his return from two months' leave, summoned the second finance minister, Dato' Seri Jamaluddin Jarjis, who brought along the cabinet minister who orchestrated it, Tengku Adnan Tengku Mansor. Tan Sri Vincent's pseudo-French establishment was only allowed slot machines, but the licence issued provides for a virtual casino, with computerised baccarat and roulette and other games of chance. The Prime Minister was not amused.

But this hubris makes it but impossible for him to realise that he continues to make mistakes galore. His latest is the casino licence given his super-crony, Tan Sri Vincent Tan, at his money-losing pseudo-French Colmer Tropicale resoort. No one in the government wants to take responsibility for it, and the fingers are pointed at the second finance minister, Dato' Seri Jamaluddin Jarjis. Even more questionable is the earlier turning of Pulau Tioman resort, also run by Tan Sri Vincent, and incidentally, in Dato' Seri Jamaluddin's Rompin parliamentary constituency, into a free trade zone after Langkawi and Labuan, and eventually into another casino.

PAHANG'S SECOND CASINO BEGINS operations in stealth this month. The Prime Minister, Dato' Seri Mahathir Mohamed's BN government has said not a word about it, with fingers pointed at the cabinet minister who signed it, the second finance minister, Dato' Seri Jamaluddin Jarjis. But the casino licence is issued to a super-crony, Tan Sri Vincent Tan, who has no qualms of making it public. He forlornly hopes it would be the lifeline he needs. How could it if it puts the BN at risk in Pahang and other states?

NO ONE IN THE NATIONAL FRONT (BN) wants the credit for Pahang's second casino, which Malaysia's super-crony opens this month at his Bukit Tinggi Colmer Tropicale resort. The Prime Minister, Dato' Seri Mahathir Mohamed, keeps quiet. So the deputy prime minister, Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi; the Pahang mentri besar, Dato' Seri Adnan Yaakub; the second finance minister, Dato' Seri Jamaluddin Jarjis; the cabinet ministers from Pahang; the government's adviser on Islamic affairs, Dato' Seri Abdul Hamid Othman; the minister in charge of Islamic affairs, Dato' Seri Abdul Hamid Zainal Abidin. Yet, two months ago, Tan Sri Vincent Tan was cock-a-hoop about it, and issues confident statements about it, but whose statements are carried only in the foreign media. His office says the casino will be open from this month.

THE GOVERNMENT OF PRIME MINISTER, DATO' Seri Mahathir Mohamed, taunts the Islamic constituency and its own perception of Malaysia as an Islamic country to issue a controversial casino licence to a super crony, Tan Sri Vincent Tan. The government has not announced it, but Tan Sri Vincent Tan, a self-proclaimed international business man of unquestioned repute who hesitates not to sue any who would not accept his view of himself, is cock-a-hoop at being allowed to operate a casino at his money-losing, privately-owned Colmer Tropicale resort in Bukit Tinggi, Pahang state, outside Kuala Lumpur. It opens this month. With 250 electronic, or computerised machines featuring such gambling games as baccarat and roulette. It is a minnow compared to Genting Highlands casino, but it is money-spinner from the day it opens. No casino in the Far East has lost money. If he had not been allowed to, his Colmer Tropicale resort would have gone the way of the nearby Mimaland resort, which collapsed spectacularly in the 1980s when it could not get the gaming licences needed to attract custom.

Sometimes they believe in their own hype. Not realising, as the Berjaya Group chairman, Tan Sri Vincent Tan would tell you of his gambling venture in Chinese, the killing of the magnitude Genting Berhad makes in its casinos in the Genting Highlands is a pipe dream; he must wish he did not venture into China. In all else, whether it is the Lion Group's venture into housing in China or Renong Berhad's venture into steel making in the Philippines, or the Berjaya Group's venture into timber in South America, or indeed, the YTL Group's ventures in Africa, they fail.

And in the Malaysia Borneo Building Society Berhad. A subsidiary of the Employees Provident Fund, it was to provide loans for housing. For years it had a stellar reputation, solid, reliable, dependable. Then it got into into the national penchant for acquiring debt as quickly as possible. It got into commercial and corporate lending, and got its chance to turn in huge losses. For the year ending Dec 31, 2001, it showed losses of RM491.9 million, and a cumulative losses of RM960 million since 1997. Most of this is for doubtful debts and lower value of buildings it underwrote. It is not mentioned that just two borrowers -- Tan Sri Vincent Tan of the Berjaya Group and Dato' Joseph Chong, the former BN MP -- owes it as much as its accumulated losses of the past four years.

The three Mahathir children, for instance, rose to the heights of Malaysia's corporate world, racked up billions in debt which they could not repay, but bailed out with official help. The Vincent Tans, the Ting Pek Khiings, the Eric Chias, the Wan Azmis, the Amin Shahs, the al-Bukhairys, the Francis Yeohs survive only as cronies, and depend on government rescue where it matters while they build empires of debt. And let the Malaysian government take care of the downside and rescue these failed Malaysian Enrons. The listed companies are but shells, with debts far exceeding their net worth. Debts of billions of ringgit with no means to repay is strewn in their balance sheets. Enron, after all, is a company with US$66 billion in assets.

That international business man of unquestioned repute, Tan Sri Dato' Seri Vincent Tan -- this first description is by his lawyer in court and his name is as in a policy report he filed against a journalist -- is rolling in good luck. First, the island resort he controls -- Pulau Tioman -- becomes duty free so 40,000 of so Singaporeans could purchase duty free items more expensively than he could at home. But Pulau Tioman is duty free because the other duty free island, Pulau Langkawi, has lost its lustre, and the Prime Minister, Dato' Seri Mahathir Mohamed, is worried that his desire to turn Malaysia into an Islamic state could put paid to it.

I was told -- which I could not yet confirm -- the MP for Merbok and the UMNO treasurer for Merbok flew recently separately to Tokyo to negotiate better rates for Petronas for its natural gas sales. The MP is, of course, Tun Daim. The other man is now tipped to be finance minister. A man the Prime Minister can trust absolutely. Who is he? I shall not tell you. Not even if a thousand screaming and angry Tan Sri Vincent Tans and Tan Sri Dr Ting Pek Khiings breathe down my neck for billions of ringgit I do not have. But here is a clue. He was once UMNO youth treasurer. He is a bin Mahathir, a tribe the Prime Minister trusts absolutely. He is looked upon as a potential UMNO treasurer. He is a member of UMNO Merbok division. He is not a MP. And it is easier for the Prime Minister to convince UMNO that he is a better choice than in the two men he had earlier in mind. But a nagging doubt remains: Is this the man we need right now overseeing the country's finances?

In Pulau Tioman the only development of any note is a tourist resort owned by the Berjaya Group, whose owner is Tan Sri Dato' Seri Vincent Tan. To get there, you go by a three-hour often-choppy boat ride from Endau or fly Berjaya Air from Kuantan. The only beneficiary to making it duty free is Tan Sri Dato' Seri Vincent Tan. He has a head start. All others must start from scratch.

Two months ago, The Sun newspaper was a much-admired newspaper. Its reporters were proud to be working for it, what they wrote was prominently featured, and their colleagues in other newspapers drooled at the freedom they had to report and comment. It did not aim to best the two market leaders, The New Straits Times and The Star, but for a niche market in the Klang Valley. It had a soul, and soon it was neck-to-neck with the NST in circulation. It still ran at a loss, but that had to do with its inflated start-up debts and too few advertisements, not its popularity or journalistic competence. Today, it is on its death throes, surrounded by vultures -- competitors, political, financial, business -- waiting to pick at its entrails at its death. Its owners, at the material time, Tan Sri Vincent Tan and his legal sidekick and holiday companion of chief justices and attorneys-general, Dato' V.K. Lingam, are responsible not for its success but its death.

Tan Sri Vincent Tan, another crony, failed in his bid to privatise sewage, failed to build the Linear City, and the monorail, which should have been ready for the 1998 Commonwealth Games but still is not. His share in each was between RM1.5 and RM2 billion. Now he is to get another privatisation handout worth RM2 billion or thereabouts. Another is the YTL group, laughing all the way to the bank with its independent power projects, excused for not completing projects given in exchange for valuable land in Bukit Bintang, and poised for even more contracts. And it failed disastrously to deliver the electric rail link from the KL Sentral to the Kuala Lumpur International Airport in time for its opening; as KL Sentral was not.

The Sun Media Corporation is in the corporate stable of that internationally known business man of unquestioned repute, Tan Sri Dato' Seri Vincent Tan, who returns as a favoured crony of the Establishment and UMNO. He failed to make privatised sewage pay, and the government had to take it back; his business empire, with debts of more than RM4 billion, would have to be rescued, and yet he is to be awarded another another privatisation of which his share is worth up to RM3 billion.

IWK cannot collect sewage fees from householders if they do not have a contract with it. IWK does not get municipal rights and privileges on acquiring a municipal service. Any question you ask of IWK comes not with an answer but a counter question: would you like your cofee made with toilet water? Or I am told water resources around the world depletes. Or even ignore the question and threaten you with legal action or touts sent to his house for that purpose. It is now 11 years since this sorry spectacle began. It was privatised to that international business man of unquestioned reputed, Tan Sri Dato' Seri Vincent Tan, who never had any intention to run a sewage utility and palmed it off (with a profit, I am told, of RM1 billion). That profit, I need not add, did not go to any of his listed companies, but to one of his private ones.

But for defamation to succeed, the aggrieved party must not only prove he had been defamed, he is out of pocket because of it. He must, in other words, prove his loss. The judge decides, at his discretion, if a man is defamed and what the damages should be. But the man must prove his further loss, if he wants more than the nominal damages the judge, until the Vincent Tan libel case, would award. In that case, that international business man of unquestioned repute, Tan Sri Vincent Tan, demanded RM20 million in defamation damages, a figure he took out of thin air, did not produce one single witness in this standard for mega damages for defamation. It set the standard for huge defamation damages without proving loss. The courts allowed general damages, hiterto at the sole discretion of the judge, to be quantified and without having to prove it.

Sewage, once a municipal responsibility, was privatised to IWK in 1990, before the general elections, in the rush to privatise government utilities to cronies of the Establishment. That internationally business man of unquestioned repute, Tan Sri Dato' Seri Vincent Tan, ran with it awhile, threatening people with perdition if they did not allow IWK to extort it. If a business man had tried to collect from me as this internationally known business of unquestioned repute wanted, he would have been sent to jail quick enough extortion. He sold out, and IWK changed hands several times, until it returned into the Ministry of Finance Incorporated. Like every privatisation, it has failed, and miserably, but it allowed the cronies, courtiers of the Establishment to make money.

IWK is in its present predicament when sewage works were taken over from the municipalities and handed over on a silver plate to that international business man of unquestioned repute, one Tan Sri Dato' Seri Vincent Tan. He messed it up, and it changed hands a few times before it landed in the domain of the Ministry of Finance Incorporated. But its bully tactics have not changed. IWK works on the basis that customers owe it money because it has taken over municipal functions from the municipalities, and by taking over the functions, it has municipal powers. It does not, pure and simple.

Pak Lah (1364)   United States (636)   Straits Times (412)   Samy Vellu (224)   Putra Jaya (200)   Chief Justice (200)   Saddam Hussein (188)   Vincent Tan (164)   Civil Service (154)   Parti KeADILan (148)   Islamic State (118)   Johore Bahru (100)   Sungei Buloh (94)   Bukit Tinggi (88)   Abdul Razak (80)   Pengkalen Pasir (68)   Ting Pek (64)   Armed Forces (59)   Soviet Union (58)

Malay Dominance (58)   Yong Teck (56)   Hong Kong (56)   Human Rights (56)   Syed Hamid (54)   Puteri UMNO (52)   Islam Hadhari (52)   Royal Commission (51)   Hussein Onn (51)   Rafidah Aziz (48)   Indian Congress (48)   Open House (44)   Vision Schools (44)   Shah Alam (44)   Malay Unity (42)   Chua Jui (42)   Abdul Taib (42)   Ampang Jaya (36)   Ras Adiba (36)

Osama Bin Laden (36)   Nik Aziz Nik (20)   Ling Liong Sik (18)   Lee Kuan Yew (18)

High Court Judge (14)   Wan Azizah Wan (9)   Lim Kit Siang (9)   Megat Junid Megat (8)

Mahathir (2960)

Anwar (2399)