In March 2018, Dr Mahathir told reporters after attending a meeting with top Pakatan Harapan (PH) leaders at the Parliament building that his children is entitled to be rich and if they are rich now it is through their own efforts.
In his first press conference after being discharged from hospital in Feb 2022, he said when his children wanted to do business, he forbade them until he quit as prime minister.
Probably he conveniently forgot that Konsortium Perkapalan, owned by his eldest son started somewhere in the early 90s while he was the Prime Minister.
If he meant he forbade them from doing business with the government while he was the Prime Minister, he could have forbade MISC, a subsidiary of Petronas from buying Konsortium Perkapalan from his eldest son in 1998.
He could have stopped Petronas and their subsidiary as the Petronas, the holding company of MISC and entity reports to him as the Prime Minister.
As an entity listed on 19 Jan 1996 on the Main Board of Bursa Malaysia, Konsortium Perkapalan definitely has better options than a privately owned business including restructuring its businesses.
If Dr Mahathir is really a principled person and practiced what he preached, he should have and probably could have instructed MISC to leave the fate and viability of Konsortium Perkapalan to the market forces and mechanics of the capital market and if MISC is still keen to participate in the future of Konsortium Perkapalan, they should participate in owning the business through a transparent process conducted in accordance to the rules and regulations of the capital market at that time.
In that manner, he does not need to defend and answer to the persistent allegations that his son benefitted from his tenure as the Prime Minister, where he often offer the same repeated response asking his critics to provide proof that his son had benefitted from his tenure.
This clearly shows that Dr Mahathir was lying.
Back in 2007, his 2nd son was listed on Forbes Top 40 richest in Malaysia coming in at No 28.
Dr Mahathir retired as the Prime Minister of Malaysia in 2003.
Based on his assertion that he forbade his children from doing business until he quit as prime minister, his 2nd son should be honored for being the only individual to join the Top 40 club in Malaysia in the shortest possible time, 4 years after his father retired as the Prime Minister as compared to all those listed in the Top 40 who spend years if not decades to reached where they are.
Be that as it may, the ordinary rakyat assumed that his children make it due to their own hard work.
Are rich people rich because they are smart?
There is little doubt that intelligence contributes to one’s economic and professional success.
Take self-made billionaires Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jensen Huang of Nvidia.
In fact, intelligence is the best predictor of both educational achievement and work performance.
And academic and professional success is, in turn, a fairly good forecaster of income.
Thus, it was surprising to read that Dr Mahathir in a posting on X said his son was accused and threatened that, if he did anything that the prosecutor considered to be contrary to the accusation, he would be jailed for 5 years with no mention of the matter being brought to court.
Any person of intelligence would know that unless the individual is arrested under the dreaded Internal Security Act (ISA), a tool used by him in the fateful month of Oct 1987 in the country against 100+ individuals or the present SOSMA, the jailing of any individual in this country can only be undertaken upon the directive passed down by the Courts.
For his eldest son to believe and felt threatened – assuming this was uttered to him during questioning –it leaves a question mark in the minds of the ordinary rakyat on how he managed to make it rich on his own hard work in the 90s.
On the positive side, it gives a lot of hope to the ordinary rakyat that all they need is just hard work to make it rich in this land of endless possibilities and opportunities and not connections or their family members to be the Prime Minister or Ministers or a politician in this country
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