Jaws dropped today as a High Court judge in Kuala Lumpur refused to allow prosecutors to freeze the return of assets, which he said were not in his mind sufficiently proven to have been stolen, pending the appeal that has been brought against that judgement….
Question No 2 in the Frequently Asked Questions guide about their Modular Housing by Cayha Mata Sarawak Berhad (CMS) has an unequivocal reply. In response to “What guarantees are given to the customer?” it answers “The structural integrity of the system is fully guaranteed and customers are furnished with a ten (10) year warranty”. Such claims
Once again local people in Sarawak have been forced to come out and protest against a greedy and un-regulated land grab. Once again a place of great natural beauty and enormous scientific importance is under threat. And once again it is the greedy Taib family who are behind the raid on one of Sarawak’s most
Sarawak Report has investigated how members of the Taib family started cashing-in on the Bandar Samariang project, straight after the Chief Minister had placed the vast 5,200 acre site into the hands of his own company CMS. The rip off has caused untold misery to poor house buyers, who have been left with sub-standard homes
The Taib family company CMS proudly boasts of its “vast land bank” in its annual reports and has started selling off chunks for tens of millions in Kuching. Commercial centres and grand housing estates are also being developed in two key areas, Bandar Samariang, where CMS has 5,200 acres, valued around half a billion
Sarawak Report can reveal that four head gangsters, who were caught after the discovery of an enormous illegal arms cache at the disputed logging and plantation concessions at Melikin, were freed by police on instructions from ministers! Since their release there has been a further series of vicious attacks on local people, whom the
So, Taib Mahmud has yet another business in Sarawak, despite all his protests to the contrary, and it is even named after him. Pehin Sri Heritage Sdn Bhd has featured on a list of 49 Malaysian companies identified in court by his former daughter in law Shanaz Taib, who is seeking a financial settlement from
Taib Mahmud has complained that Sarawak is in the ‘media spotlight’ after years of ‘obscurity’. But, thanks to that obscurity and his own media blackout, gangsterism has been allowed to flourish unreported against the native people of the state. For years these organised thugs have waged systematic violence against rural communities, in order to enforce the
A flurry of denials poured out last week in response to this site’s reporting on the questionable assignment of projects by the Ministry of Islamic Affairs. In particular, the Majlis Islam Sarawak (Sarawak Islamic Council) issued a 5 page rebuttal, selecting what it identified as nine issues raised in the report and then apparently
Following our report earlier this week that the Minister for Islamic Affairs and Chairman of the Baitulmal Fund had awarded a mega-building project to his own company, the opposition PKR party has reported Daud Abdul Rahman to the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission. The opposition DAP party has also gone public to repeat its demands that the Tabang
The Assistant Minister for Islamic Affairs, Daud Abdul Rahman, presides over all the money collected and distributed by Muslims in the state, through his role as Chairman of the Baitulmal Board (Tabung Baitulmal Sarawak/ TBS). These funds include the obligatory Zakat, raised from the faithful in order to help the poor and needy. However, much
Leading politicians in Sarawak seem addicted to showing off how kind they are by handing out money and cheques to the poor and downtrodden in society Scarcely a day goes by when newspapers do not feature a “very poor person” receiving this ‘benevolence’ from smug and very wealthy individuals, who want the world to see how ‘generous’ they are.
Over and again Chief Minister Taib Mahmud pulls arbitrary figures from his imagination to deny his destruction of Sarawak. Flunkeys line up to agree with him. For example, not so long ago the dotty old dictator pronounced that 70% of Sarawak remains untouched virgin jungle and that most of the rest of the state is
Following information passed to Sarawak’s DAP by Sarawak Report, the party is considering reporting Torstein Sjotveit, the Norwegian CEO of Sarawak Energy, to Malaysia’s Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC). For some months already the party has raised concerns about Sarawak Energy (SEB)’s suspicious preferences towards the company Sarawak Cable Bhd when awarding contracts. Sarawak Energy (SEB) is
Just days after an election marred by bribery and ballot rigging, Sarawak’s Chief Minister made his first move to set the tone of his conduct as BN’s ‘kingmaker’. He tripled the salaries for state YBs and ministers. The effect was to bump up his own salary as Chief Minister from RM13,000 a month to RM39,000.
This past month saw Taib Mahmud’s 50th anniversary of uninterrupted public office. Thirty three of those years have been spent as Chief Minister of the State of Sarawak. He has chosen this symbolic moment to make various remarks acknowledging the ‘lack of progress’ achieved by the Dayak people during that time. Yet, cheekily, he suggests
Concerns have been mounting over the millions of dollars being paid out by the Australian government to the company Ta Ann, owned by the fabulously wealthy cousin and business proxy of the Chief Minister, Hamed Sepawi. The amount paid out so far in incentives first to locate in Tasmania; then to surrender previously agreed logging
Polling stations in known opposition areas were slammed shut mid-morning across Baram on the day of the Federal Election, it has been revealed, leaving queues of outraged voters unable to cast their votes. This was just one of the methods by which officials gained a wafer thin majority for BN in a region that has
Sarawak Report would like to draw the attention of the United States financial regulators to what has emerged as an exceedingly large and unusual payment made during a recent off-shore bond transaction, conducted by one of its major banks.
Relations between the UK and Malaysia should naturally be warm. However, as Prime Minister Najib Razak makes his way towards the UK this week, David Cameron’s welcome party should concentrate on that friendship with the Malaysian people, rather than selfish financial opportunities. After all, Najib represents a discredited minority government, which everyone knows would have
This weekend the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) made clear that there is a huge amount of information pointing to the fact that it is Taib who is extremely “naughty and dishonest”. These are, of course, the words he famously used to describe the commission itself, when he was questioned about its investigations into his blatant
In a surprise development the Taib family company Ta Ann has accepted a multi-million dollar settlement from the Australian Government, in order to give up major timber supplies in the state of Tasmania. The move is a stunning vindication for environmental campaigners in the state, who have suffered vilification and arrests for protesting against the logging
In a shocking departure from normal practice one of BN’s top business cronies, Ananda Krishnan, has secured direct control of a series of Sarawak’s off-shore oil fields. It makes his private company Pexco “one of the largest acreage holders in Malaysia”, according to its own CEO. The astonishing development has placed the multi-billionaire (known for
Sarawak Report is flattered to note that the Chief Minister regards our occasional observations on his management of the State of Sarawak as tantamount to a significant threat. So much so, that he chose his post election speech to the State Assembly as a platform to rail against us and denounce this and our sister
In case readers of Sarawak Report failed to pick up on the assessment of Sarawak by one of the world’s top news agencies, Agence France Press, we reprint (below) how it was presented in the South China Morning Post. Taib had better accept that the international perception of his regime has finally wised up and
