According to a report by Bernama, Khazanah Nasional has stated that it has no plans to sell PLUS Malaysia to any party. The company’s managing director, Datuk Shahril Riza Ridzuan, said all takeover offers for Malaysia’s largest highway operator from local and foreign entities have been rejected.
“There are many offers from different parties but our reply to all of them is very simple – we are not interested in selling,” he said during an interview that aired on TV3 on October 5. He added that companies that have submitted their bids – namely RRJ Capital and Maju Holdings – were offering to buy PLUS at a much lower price than its real value.
“If you want to buy [an asset] from the EPF (Employees Provident Fund) or Khazanah, you should offer a fair market price,” Shahril Riza said. He also touched upon the proposals from interested parties, where the difference between the price paid and real value would be used as toll discounts for the people. “If you want to give discounts, it should be from your profits, not from us,” he remarked.
Currently, ownership of the toll concessionaire is shared between UEM Group – a subsidiary of Khazanah – and the Employees Provident Fund (EPF). The former holds a 51% share in PLUS, with the remaining 49% owned by EPF.
Shahril Riza also noted that Khazanah is the investment arm of the government, and it must ensure that strategic assets such as PLUS are not sold to parties that are solely focused on profits without any thought for the people. “If PLUS is making profits, it goes back to the government through Khazanah, or to the Malaysians via EPF. So if you allow private parties to take over PLUS, and those parties make a lot of profit, people are not going to be happy,” he said.
gov no need to spend few bil to buy it over, just build another highway beside PLUS with less 50% toll fee will do.
Paultan is becoming more and more like a political site…
With all the non automotive annoucements and promotions coming in, the latest being the Kleptokrat movie made by George Soros.
Is Paultan Stooping lower and lower to seek funding as well?
That ad you are referring to is a Google Display Network ad, and not an in-house ad hosted by paultan.org.
We are still, and will always be an automotive industry-focused news website. This article, for instance, concerns Malaysian highways and tolls, hence we feel is relevant to Malaysian motorists.
Now that you have identified the issue, perhaps you can go a step further by applying some morale on ad space filtering.
Being selective is the word, that separates PT from other sites.
Please don’t make PT as your own personal site. It’s not like you pay to read the news here.
We do have a few filters for GDN ads (what should and should not appear on our site), but unfortunately we can’t approve each and every ad. The ads that you see are also targeted based on your own user behaviour through Google’s network.
Khazanah or EPF please don’t sell. Unless EPF can guarantee of giving dividend of more than 6% per annum for the next 50 years. If EPF can guarantee this, then EPF should sell its share in PLUS.