A Rogue Chief Minister And Rogue Loan Defaulters

Hantu Laut

Away on holiday somewhere in the Himalayas. 

Haven't posted anything the past two weeks, bit tired writing about Malaysian politics, which is fast sliding down the gutter.

Badasses from both sides of the political divide giving the country a bad name.

When you have chief minister of a state going overseas running down his own country, you know what kind of fuck head you have heading a government and one who thinks his state is a separate entity and another sovereign power.

Now, I would like to ask Lim Guan Eng where his allegiance lies, here or in Timbaktu?

No matter how much you are against the government, as an elected member you can only denigrate or ridicule the government within the country or in parliament, but doing it overseas in an international forum is outright treachery and should not be condoned by any patriotic Malaysian. 

To be fair to him, the government must get a transcript of his speech to determine whether the complaint is true or not and whether the nature of the speech is treasonous. The transcript should also be published in the media for the people to judge.

From a chief minister who thinks he is an emperor of an island nation to a government losing sense in good governance, using soft approach to loan defaulters depriving others of the opportunity to further their studies

I read this with great concern concerning PTPPN loan defaulters. What kind of signal is the government sending to the Malays and Bumiputras. 

Hutang, tak payah bayar balik kah?

A mind-boggling sum of RM2.3 billion in unpaid loans by 400,000 defaulters of the PTPPN study loans of mainly Malay/Bumiputra students. 

Now, you know why the other races rejected the BN government. This is the kind of nonsense they do that riled up the other races. 

A proposal to denounce and blacklist the name of defaulters was opposed by UMNO Youth chief Khairy Jamaluddin and accepted by the Cabinet.Blacklisting may not be the answer. PTPPN must use legal action to collect the debts from adamant borrowers.

We, businessmen, would be severely punished if we failed to repay our debts, not only our own loans, but personal guarantee we gave to financial institution for third party's debt, which can be your friend, relative, or your own company where you may be one of the directors.Failure to repay would end up in bankruptcy.

Debt is a debt and must be repaid. If the borrower is not able to repay on time than the loan should be rescheduled to ease the borrower's burden.

Politicians should not set bad example by defending these rogue borrowers, who, obviously, have no intention of repaying the loans from the very beginning.

Legal action should be taken against the loan defaulters. 

Walang Pilipinos: Hong Kong and Blatant Racism

Asia Sentinel

Appellate court denies permanent residency to domestic workers

The judges of Hong Kong's Court of Final Appeal have surrendered to their own self interest in refusing the rights of foreign domestic workers to apply for permanent residence. 

The five judges ruled unanimously Monday against Philippines appellants Evangeline Banao Vallejos and Daniel Domingo, who argued that foreign domestic workers should have the same right to permanent Hong Kong residency as white-collar expatriates after working in the territory for seven years.

In a case which set natural justice and the simple, direct language of Hong Kong's Basic Law or mini-constitution, against political pressures, the judges could well also be accused of rank racism.

The government was threatening to take the case to Beijing's National People's Congress for an interpretation of the Basic Law should the judges rule against the government's insistence that the foreign domestic workers had no right even to apply for permanent residence, let alone to be granted it. So the bench, in unison, and in order to prevent the government undermining its authority, opted instead to undermine basic principle of justice.

They resorted to the typical lawyer trick of pretending that plain words did not actually mean what they said but something entirely different and supposedly in the minds of those who drafted the Basic Law two decades ago.

The law very simply states that anyone who has been ordinarily resident in Hong Kong for more than seven years has the right to apply for permanent residence. Whether they get it or not then depends on the degree of commitment to Hong Kong they can show. These tests have been very lenient and almost anyone with the seven year qualification could receive it. Indeed that remains the case with the assorted foreign bankers, chefs, forex traders and Pilates instructors etc who receive that right and thus can only be expelled for some heinous offense.

However, the word-twisting judges have deemed that somehow foreign domestic workers cannot be deemed "ordinarily resident" in Hong Kong, however long they live there, despite the fact that they are in regular employment and are only entitled to have holidays outside the territory for two weeks every two years. Anyone else can be outside Hong Kong for two months a year and still qualify.

The difference between the two categories of workers, domestic and all others, is not actually one of income or ability. It is primarily one of race. Thus the judges, all Chinese or Caucasians, deem all the domestic workers to be of a lower species of humanity. All of them are brown skinned people from other parts of Asia, mainly from Indonesia and Philippines plus a few from Sri Lanka, Thailand and India. Mainland Chinese are not allowed to become such workers because it would condemn them to this lower status and so would be unthinkable to the authorities.Read more.

I Just Met A Very Racist Chinese !

Yesterday, I arrived KLIA from KK and my wife from Phnom Penh, after visiting our daughter and grandchildren there.My wife's plane arrived 20 minutes earlier 
but she said she would wait for me so we can take the same taxi to our hotel.
Read more.

Global Wealth: Experts Not Worth Their Salt

Hantu Laut

Credit Suisse Global Wealth.........with such big name, nobody cares or dares to fault their reports. 

Rating agencies or whatever you want to call them are, sometimes,  more an abomination of indulgence rather than giving factual result.

I can understand evaluating the wealth of people who control large public listed companies, but how do you go about evaluating private wealth? 

While I do not doubt the Singapore figure of millionaires, I believe Malaysia has more than the 36,000 quoted by the agency. It is still a mystery to me what formula they used to measure the wealth of the 36,000 individuals in Malaysia. 

Many Malaysians are also tax evaders, cash rich and difficult to evaluate their true wealth. 

How do they do it? 

Do they send them questionnaires, check their tax returns, check their bank accounts, check their properties and so on, to arrive at a valuation? Because of bank Secrecy Act, no bank will divulge their customers particulars to anyone.

The report also say house prices have gone down by 40% in Malaysia. Ask any Malaysian if they agree with this ridiculous finding. 

I can't speak for other parts of Malaysia but Sabah property price has gone through the roof and heading for Cloud 9 for the developers and hell for young people to buy a home. The prices of land have also skyrocketed and profiteering by developers have made matters worse for home purchasers. 

A semi-detached house which used to cost around RM200,000 just ten years ago is now costing between RM800,000 to RM1.0 million. I presumed Peninsular Malaysia is no better than what's happening in Sabah. The prices of property in KL hasn't gone down that much either. So! where the figure came from ?

Comparing Singapore and Hongkong with Malaysia may be fair game but Indonesia is a completely different kettle of fish. Indonesia has a population of over 240 million, the 4th largest in the world, and have only 104,000 millionaires, that is horrendously worse than Malaysia.

The report also says "Malaysia was listed among “frontier” wealth countries along with Egypt, Indonesia, Tunisia and Vietnam."

That's probably the biggest gaffe or, maybe, a political fluff coming out of Credit Suisse. 

If you have visited all these countries and if you had opened your eyes wide enough, you would see, we certainly are not in the same league. Malaysia is way ahead of these countries in standard of living.

Tabled below is GDP per capita and GDP of the countries concerned:

Countries      Per capita GDP (2011)            GDP (2011) Bil

_____________________________________________

Malaysia          $15,800.-                               $453

Tunisia                9,600.-                                 102

Egypt                   6,600.-                                 303         

Indonesia             4,700.-                              1,139

Vietnam               3,400.-                                 304

On a productivity/population ratio,  Malaysia's productivity per unit economic output is still much higher than Indonesia and all the other countries with the exception of Tunisia, which has a smaller population than Malaysia.

Sometimes, the experts are not worth their salt, or is the survey correctly reported.

KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 18 — Malaysia is projected to have 76,000 millionaires in five years time, but will still be ranked behind Singapore’s 249,000 and Indonesia’s 207,000 people who are expected to be on the rich list in 2017, according to a new global wealth report released this week.

The Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report forecast total global household wealth would increase by an average of 8 per cent annually over the next five years, driven by emerging markets likeChina, Brazil, Malaysia, Russia or India.

Mean wealth per adult is projected to rise to US$67,000 (RM 203,645) by 2017 from US$48,500 this year.

The report said China is expected to surpass Japan as the second-wealthiest country in the world by 2017 while the United States should maintain its leading position.

Credit Suisse said that Singapore was in the list of top ten countries in the wealth-per adult league table, along with  Switzerland, Norway, Luxembourg, and Sweden – as well as Australia and G7 members, Japan, France, the USA and the UK.

The report added that notable cases of emerging wealth were found in Chile, Columbia, the Czech Republic, Lebanon, Slovenia and Uruguay.

Malaysia was listed among “frontier” wealth countries along with Egypt, Indonesia, Tunisia and Vietnam.

Credit Suisse said that for 2012, Malaysia has 36,000 millionaires, while Singapore has 156,000 and Indonesia 104,000 in the bracket.

Hong Kong, with 92,000 millionaires this year, will see membership in the rich club grow to 180,000 in 2017. Read more.

Phnom Penh