The Brave New World of Fat4

As newspapers around Malaysia champions the relatively lowly popular BN government visit to China, Singapore could not say the same for its PM visit to China. Najib had a rousing welcome by non other than premier Wen Jia Bao. Sime Darby scored a big project in China, apparently the biggest ever by a foreign company, eclipsing any western countries investments.

Every country has an underground economy. It is a matter of how big it is. It is interesting to see Malaysia’s GDP or GNP or whatever economic measuring tools you use is only 10% of its neighbour Singapore but yet the people living in Malaysia can be seen driving nice big cars, live in big houses and fly around the region. Unbelievable? No wonder even newspapers around Malaysia recently claimed how Hillary Clinton has said that US are willing to learn from Malaysia and another proudly claimed that Obama salutes our PM. Come to think of it, besides being near to his childhood home of Indonesia, I doubt he will remember anything about Malaysia.

It is rather interesting to note that one of the biggest winners in the recent mini-budget as announced by our current Finance Minister is Air Asia.

Like I have said in my past posts, Air Asia may had been calling bluff in their previous KLIA @ East proposal whereby they would eventually be “forced” to accept a “good for all parties” solution at a specifically designed terminal with tax payers money. I was quite right when Najib announced a RM2billion funding for the building of a new LCCT terminal which could easily last Air Asia for the next decade.

Reading the papers today, I noted how the CEO of MAS, Idris Jala said that he is happy to see MAS making a nice profit of RM46 million despite the gloomy situation across the aviation industry. Frankly, I salute him for turning around a company which had been in the shame since it was separated from a combined entity then including the world’s most profitable airlines, Singapore Airlines. Perhaps if it had remain as part of the entity, the managerial problems of a loss making airlines may not have existed.

In the recent big hoo-haa on Labu airport also known as KLIA East, everyone seems agitated but yet at the end of the day, the whole thing was resolved amicably. So now that the dust has settled, can we ask what exactly has happened?

I personally believe that there was some sort of Art of War at play then. If one were to question the logics, it would ONLY be logical that the hub be developed at KLIA no matter how strong Tony’s argument was, which he went to the extent of publishing on Air Asia’s website. Even as the whole blogosphere was thoroughly negative about the whole deal, emerge the supposedly highest traffic blogger coming out to support Tony. Worse are Kenny Sia’s half witted arguments which were along the lines of those of Air Asia. Kenny has been used as a pawn in this scenario. What Kenny fails to show his readers was his close association with Tony as evident with his recent fund raising exercise in which Tony had personally contributed RM5,000.00.