Show us the money, MP tells MAS suitor – Bernama
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- Show us the money, MP tells MAS suitor – Bernama
An UMNO Member of Parliament has asked a three-month old company which wants to rescue ailing Malaysia Airlines (MAS) to "show us your money first and who your financial backers are" before the proposal can be taken seriously.
Datuk Johari Abdul Ghani, the MP for Titiwangsa, in casting doubts over the proposal by Jentayu Danaraksa, raised other questions as well given the sketchy status of Jentayu's plan made known so far that does not seem to gel with the mammoth 12-point plan announced by Khazanah Nasional to restructure and turn around MAS.
"Where are you going to bring the money from? Show us your money. If you say you have backers, who are your backers," he told Bernama.
Johari said he was opposed to Jentayu's plan to asset strip MAS as revealed by the company, which has submitted a proposal to the prime minister to capitalise on the aircraft leasing business and take over MAS' profit-making maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) business as well as its sister airline Firefly.
Jentayu managing director Feriz Omar had said that the proposal was to complement Khazanah's plan and that the company was willing to invest "over and above" the RM6 billion Khazanah, which owns MAS, has committed in its plan.
"If MAS can be given to any Tom, Dick and Harry or anyone who can come up with a working paper, I am afraid the problems MAS went through when it was privatised to a corporate figure will recur. We are not going to repeat the same mistake," he said of the 1994 failed privatisation when Tan Sri Tajudin Ramli took over the airline.
Johari, who is also an Umno Supreme Council member, said it is wrong for anyone to just pick and choose only the profitable units of MAS because running the airline is a portfolio by itself.
MAS's uniqueness is that it has everything and its management has to look at it in totality, and no "entrepreneur who just appeared overnight" could simply choose what's profitable at the expense of other components.
"This cannot be done. You can outsource facilities on condition you have many choices. But if you have no choice, you don't outsource and you have to keep within the system," said Johari, who is also a prominent corporate figure.
He said an airline like MAS should retain its MRO unit because it is vital for training and retraining to upgrade skills of workers, adding MAS could not divest its MRO because it is a catalyst organisation.
Elaborating on Jentayu's plan, he said: "Anyone can come up with an offer. MAS should write to them to ask who are your bankers and how do you raise your money, what is your business plan and concept and how do you address the deteriorating market shares.
"This proposal looks nice on paper but I don't see any one of them credible enough to raise that kind of money.
"When I read newspaper reports that they plan to raise the money from foreigners, we are not going to take this airline to a foreigner. The idea is to keep it within Malaysia and a Malaysian-controlled company."
Johari said there are plenty of foreigners with a lot of money and who could even invest RM6 billion, which is equivalent to only US$2 billion.
The infrastructure that MAS has accumulated over the years is worth much more than that, and the government has already injected RM17 billion into MAS, he said.
"These are the issues we have to be very careful about and I think the RM6 billion that Khazanah is going to pump in, what's important is, let's get the business model right," he said.
Khazanah has received minority shareholders' approval to take MAS private and this will kick-start the plan it announced on August 29 to overhaul the airline.
Under the plan, Khanazah will inject RM6 billion into MAS as well as take it private, axe 6,000 jobs, reduce the scale and size of the company, renegotiate contracts and set up a new outfit to take over the operations by July 1 next year. – Bernama, November 23, 2014.
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