Chapter 6 Scandal, What Scandal?

(first three paragraphs)

Dr Mahathir’s administration took office in 1981 with the slogan bersih, cekap, amanah – clean, efficient, trustworthy. Almost immediately, however, it became embroiled in financial scandals that exploded with startling regularity, some of them truly spectacular. A few were of an order of magnitude that would have bankrupted most developing nations. But tropical Malaysia was generously endowed with natural resources, notably offshore hydrocarbon deposits, and commanded by a leader committed to rapid development. The expanding economy absorbed the shock of much of the dissipated wealth and where necessary, the gaps left by the missing billions were plugged with the proceeds of oil and gas exports.

Almost all the scandals involved the government directly, or senior officials and businessmen closely connected to UMNO. In some cases, impropriety – whether illegal or merely ill-advised – was officially authorized or condoned for an allegedly higher purpose. Public funds were stolen in various ways, or simply poured into a big black hole in the name of ventures that bordered on the reckless, improbable, or criminal. The extent of the losses – and in some cases the way the money disappeared – was never fully documented. Dr Mahathir’s administration generally did not hold Malaysians accountable for the financial disasters, and often laid the blame on others. By the early 1990s, cynics remarked that it had been a good decade for bad behavioour, or a bad decade for good behaviour.

Although he initiated, promoted or at least approved some of the undertakings that turned into outright scams, Dr Mahathir was remarkably blase about the massive wastage and far from embarrassed that another government slogan was “leadership by example”. His eyes fixed on the bigger picture, his vision of a modern Malaysia. Dr Mahathir was more concerned to minimize publicity about mistakes and misdeedsthan to punish those responsible for egregious offences. Two visiting academics, who interviewed him in the late 1990s, were taken aback to find him shrugging off the bad experiences and uninterested in studying what happened in order to avoid a repeat. Noting that Dr Mahathir on special occasions could be persuaded to sing his favourite sone, My Way, they suggested that an approriate encore would be the anthem of the late French chanteuse, Edith Piaf, Je ne regrette rien, I have no regrets.