He said as his son was trained in management, being a graduate of University of Pennsylvania in the US, he was often asked to be a director without pay.
He said: "Only that sometimes there are meeting allowances and the like…(but) he does not have even one sen of share of these companies".
Mahathir said: "If Mirzan were to receive RM10,000 as monthly allowance from each company, his monthly income from allowances alone would be RM950,000 - almost RM1 million a month.
"This is a lie. He (Mirzan) only gives his services to help companies owned by the government, PNB and others. It would be different if Mirzan became an executive director with a salary".
Mahathir’s reaction is most illuminating. It would appear that Malaysians had not realised that the country has a world-class genius in management guru in Mirzan Mahathir, which is why nearly a hundred companies want his expertise by inviting him to sit on their boards of management.
Malaysia has many talented citizens who have better qualifications and expertise than Mirzan, getting not just a management degree from the University of Pennsylvania but MBAs from the most prestigious American universities like Harvard and Yale, but they are not asked to "to be a director without pay" by companies in Malaysia. Why is this so? Would Mirzan be invited to sit on the boards of about a hundred companies if he is not his father’s son?
If Mirzan is such a management genius, why is it necessary for the government through Petronas to bail out his companies, running into hundreds of millions of ringgit, as in the Malaysian International Shipping Corporation?
Although Mahathir said Mirzan does not have a single sen in the 95 companies, this is not borne out by the Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange records which show that Mirzan acquired corporate shareholdings worth over a billion ringgit at the market value during their acquisitions.
Can Mahathir explain the discrepancy between his denial that Mirzan "does not have even one sen of share in these companies" with the KLSE records that he owns over a billion ringgit of these shares at the market value of their acquisitions.
This is an issue of great relevance and importance to Malaysia, and has nothing to do with the general election tomorrow - for its concerns the integrity of public office and allegations of corruption, cronyism and nepotism.
Let Mirzan make public a full list of the companies he is a director, reveal the amount and worth of shares he own on acquisition, the income whether director’s fees or other commissions he received from each company for the whole of last year, so that Malaysians can know whether Mahathir had been telling the truth when he claimed that Mirzan "does not have even one sen of share" in the 95 companies shown up by the KLSE registry records.
Mahathir should realise that if he cannot explain why the KLSE registry shows that Mirzan owns over a billion ringgit worth of shares in the various listed companies on the acquisition of these shares although he claimed that Mirzan "does not have even one sen of share in these companies", Mirzan’s corporate acquisitions and role would immediately become one of the hot issues in the new Parliament after election tomorrow.
(28/11/99)