Cahya Mata Sarawak (CMS) is on the brink of becoming blacklisted by global investors. Sarawak’s largest company, CMS was privatized into governor Taib Mahmud’s hands in order to generate massive wealth for his family. The Bruno Manser Fund (BMF) and the Norwegian NGO FIVAS encourage Norway’s government to divest funding from CMS due to the company’s financially and environmentally corrupt antics.
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Sarawak Governor Tun Abdul Taib Mahmud, photo by The Malaysian Insider
KUCHING: In a joint letter to Norges Bank, the Swiss-based Bruno Manser Fund (BMF) and the Norwegian NGO FIVAS have recommended the exclusion of Sarawak’s largest infrastructure company, Cahya Mata Sarawak (CMS), from the investment universe of Norway’s Pension Fund Global.
The government pension fund, which manages Norway’s petroleum income, has a 2.02% share in CMS, corresponding to a value of US$11.38 million.
According to the guidelines for the exclusion of companies from the Government Pension Fund Global, companies may be excluded if there is “an unacceptable risk that the company is involved in corruption”.
In its newly released report on CMS, BMF claims that the formerly state-owned enterprise was privatised into the hands of the family of then chief minister Taib Mahmud.
The Taib Family, photo by The Sarawak Report
The family of Taib, currently Sarawak Governor, still has a majority holding in the company, which has benefited from state contracts worth US$1.4 billion in recent years, according to the report.
Lukas Straumann, the executive director of BMF, describes this as the result of “an anomaly in a democratic state and can only be explained by massive corruption, which has deeply penetrated Sarawak’s corridor of power.”
Over the past few years, Pension Fund Global has blacklisted three of the largest logging giants in Sarawak, allegedly because of “the unacceptable risk of the companies being responsible for severe environmental damage”.
BMF has already called on Malaysia to set up a royal commission of inquiry to examine the privatisation of CMS into the hands of the Taib family.
A video titled “Corruption Management Sarawak – Cahya Mata Sarawak and Malaysia’s Taib Family”
The report on “Corruption Management Sarawak” is at http://bmf.ch/upload/berichte/cms_report.pdf