Malaysian Maverick: Mahathir Mohamad in Turbulent Times, Barry Wain [best mystery novels of all time .txt] 📗

unhappiness to close friends. "Mahathir's disagreement with Abdullah started with his delaying tactics over [appointing] Najib," said Abdullah Ahmad, who kept in touch with the former premier. "Next was the release of Anwar. The rest followed."[40] When Abdullah Badawi encroached on core elements of Dr. Mahathir's vision — Proton, the national car; the construction of a bridge to Singapore; and Putrajaya, the new capital — the former prime minister exploded in public. He was an adviser to Proton Holdings Bhd., the publicly listed company producing the car, and he used the post to go to the company's defence.

Proton was already under siege as trade barriers fell in Southeast Asia and the company progressively lost the protection that had long made it profitable. It faced a further threat if Abdullah was serious about cleaning up the ponderous, government-linked concerns that dominated the country's business scene and equity market. The task fell to Khazanah Nasional Bhd., the state-owned investment agency that held a controlling stake in Proton, and in the nation's power, airline and telecommunications companies. What happened at Proton showed how deeply politics was embedded in business under Dr. Mahathir's philosophy, and how hard it would be to disentangle them.

Contrary to Abdullah's assurance that Proton's board would have the final say in all management matters, Mahaleel Ariff, the Mahathir protégé who had been chief executive since 1997, began making decisions after consulting Dr. Mahathir alone. When the board decided not to renew Mahaleel's contract, Abdullah stepped in at Dr. Mahathir's request and overruled the board. Abu Hassan Kendut, Chairman of Proton, quit in protest. Later, the board successfully removed Mahaleel after he gave a newspaper interview and criticized the government for not providing enough protection for Proton.[41] Dr. Mahathir basically declared war on the government by defending Mahaleel and endorsing his criticism. He opened another can of worms by claiming "irregularities" in the opaque import-licensing system for foreign cars, by which, he said, the imports posed unfair competition for Proton.

With Mahaleel out of the way, Proton proclaimed its independence at the end of 2005 by unloading a 57.7 per cent stake in the debt-ridden Italian motorcycle manufacturer MV Augusta Motors. Proton's new management largely blamed Augusta for a pre-tax loss of RM158.8 million for the three months to 30 September 2005, the second consecutive quarterly loss and a sharp reversal from the RM439.8 million pre-tax profit for the six-month period a year earlier. The disposal of Augusta was a monstrous rebuke for Dr. Mahathir and Mahaleel, who together had purchased the famed but struggling motorcycle designer and maker less than a year earlier. Proton paid 70 million euros for Augusta and sold it for a token one euro.

In a joint statement, Dr. Mahathir and Mahaleel said their credibility and honesty were at stake. They questioned the rationale behind the sale and posed a series of questions that, they said, the company owed it to shareholders and the public to answer. In later comments, Dr. Mahathir took issue with Proton management's contention that Augusta did not have any synergy with the carmaker. Failing to elicit a response from Proton, Dr. Mahathir mocked Abdullah's new order: "I thought that this is supposed to be a very transparent world where everything is done in full view of everyone."

If Abdullah had been reluctant to take tough decisions that would put him into direct conflict with Dr. Mahathir over Proton, he surely agonized over plans for a second bridge to link Malaysia with Singapore. But on this issue, there was no fudging their differences. The Malaysians had argued with the Singaporeans for a decade to share the cost of replacing the old causeway with a bridge so that ships could pass through the narrow Johore Strait, but Singapore saw no reason to scrap the causeway, and this item became entangled with all the others on their bilateral agenda. In an act of brinkmanship close to retirement, Dr. Mahathir authorized a construction company to begin work on Malaysia's half of the bridge. Abdullah initially told the company to go slow,[42] before cancelling the contract in April 2006, outraging Dr. Mahathir and causing an irreparable breach between them.

To Abdullah, it made no sense to build a bridge to nowhere. Connecting it to the Singapore end of the causeway would invite legal action by Singapore, since it involved relocating water pipes and a train line, as well as demolishing half the causeway. Going ahead with half a bridge and hoping that one day it might be turned into a full bridge would subject Malaysia to ridicule and place it at Singapore's mercy. For Dr. Mahathir the nationalist, however, halting work was surrendering Malaysian sovereignty and kowtowing to the Singaporeans "as if you are scared of them". Dr. Mahathir pronounced Malaysia a "half-past six country", invoking a term whose origin was obscure but whose meaning he made crystal clear: a "country with no guts".[43]

Similarly, Dr. Mahathir disagreed volubly with Abdullah for suspending construction of a monorail in Putrajaya in the name of fiscal responsibility. Dr. Mahathir had been prepared to press ahead with the new city even during the Asian economic crisis, and he rejected the argument that the state was currently short of funds. Convinced the train line should be financed off-budget, if necessary, he pointed to "record" profits earned by state oil and gas company Petronas, to the flush Employees Provident Fund and to accumulating national reserves, as evidence that money was available.

Although Dr. Mahathir repeatedly had pledged not to interfere once he handed over, he justified his intervention on the grounds that Abdullah had broken their private, implicit agreement first. "Before I stepped down, we agreed that certain things needed to be completed, because this has been agreed upon," said Dr. Mahathir. "And he never said he would not. And then he reversed things that were decided, sometimes in the Cabinet."[44]

Dr. Mahathir was too angry to contemplate the sweet ironies of political life, that what goes around comes around. Thirty years earlier, Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah's career had