ada apa dengan khalid ibrahim?

For someone who had once served as a teacher, Tan Sri Khalid Ibrahim, has indeed come a long way.

Many will remember him for the role he played in bringing back Guthrie, which was then listed in the London Stock Exchange, to Malaysia, in 1981.

Khalid, who joined Permodalan Nasional Berhad (PNB), the Bumiputera trust agency, in 1978, as an investment manager, rose to become its CEO seven years later.

Under his leadership and to a large measure with the close guidance from the late Tun Ismail Ali, PNB became one of the most successful trust agency in the world, mobilising billions of ringgit from Malaysia's son of the soil community, and investing it in the Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange.

PNB is one of the most important instrument created by the Government, to realise the objective of the New Economic Policy (NEP), for the Bumiputera community to achieve a 30% target in the country's economy by 1990.

On a personal level, Khalid is known as an outspoken personality.

He is quite frank and couldn't care less for those who might not like what he has to say.

He is known to be tough and uncompromising.

Criticism is usually thrust at his displayed arrogance and his disposition of one who knows it all.

His appointment as Keadilan's Tresurer General is not a surprise to many, given the many outspoken interviews that he has given to the pro-opposition medias such as Harakah and Malaysiakini for the past one year.

His criticism on the NEP, is a bit ironic, given the fact that he is one of biggest beneficiery of the policy.

When Khalid stepped down as the CEO of PNB in 1994, he was given a "golden handshake", in the form of 50 million units of Guthrie worth at RM2.50 per share.

It was a "golden handshake" because throughout 1994, Guthrie's shares were traded at between RM2.80 to RM5.95 per share.

So, can someone, who was once the largest beneficiary of the NEP, be the right crusader in dismantling the system?

ada apa dengan merger?

On 27 November 2006, CIMB Investment Bank presented a proposal to merge the operations of Sime Darby, Golden Hope and Guthrie into a single entity.

The offer, valued at more than RM30 billion, will make Synergy Drive, the combined entity, the 6th largest company in Bursa Malaysia by market capitalisation.

Synergy Drive will also be the biggest plantation group in the world.

It will have a market value of RM31 billion, 600,000 hectares of plantations, 107,000 workforce and operations from Indonesia to Venezuela.

Synergy Drive's revenue of RM26 billion, will be bigger than the GDP of countries such Cameroon, Rwanda or Nicaragua.

The company's landbank will be 20 times the size of Singapore.

It seems like the merger is driven by the principle that size does matters.

Being big allows you to reap the benefits of economies of scale.

With size come dominance.

But someone, perhaps have forgotten, to remind CIMB that in the new world, being big does not neccesarily mean better.

Scale didn't insulate GM (General Motors) from catastrophic decline.

It didn't help British Airways (BA) from being hit by smaller rivals like Virgin, Ryan Air or British Midlands.

And it certainly didn't prevent the biggest man made floating object - the Titanic, from sinking.