TOO late. The genie is out of the bottle. The ship has left the shore.

Choose any of the above and it would aptly describe the move by Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi and Finance Minister II Johari Ghani to control the fallout from the government’s decision to cancel the contract to develop Bandar Malaysia.

At a staff meeting at the Home Ministry this week, Zahid tried to ring fence Prime Minister Najib Razak from any involvement in the decision to pull the plug on the deal following the IWH-CREC Sdn Bhd (ICSB) consortium’s inability to fulfil its financial obligations.

He said that the land owner TRX City Sdn Bhd board of directors made the decision for purely business reasons and to minimise loss of opportunity caused by the buyer’s failure to pay on time.

Zahid is partially correct.

Yes, it was the TRX City directors who signed off on the decision to cancel the RM7.41 billion contract but only after the secretary-general of Treasury Irwan Siregar Abdullah consulted his boss at the Finance Ministry, Najib Razak.

No civil servant, no matter how powerful or senior, would dare move unilaterally to stub out a deal that involves a large state-owned enterprise from Malaysia’s newest best friend, China.

CREC or China Railway Engineering Corporation owns 60% of ICSB, with the remainder by Johor developer Iskandar Waterfront Holdings Sdn Bhd.

The Malaysian Insight understands from highly-placed sources that the Finance Minister was kept in the loop after Finance Ministry officials red-flagged the consortium’s breaches.

Only a tight group of government officials and Najib knew that a decision had been made to cancel the contract between TRX City and IWH-CREC.

Not all members of the Budiman Committee – set up by the government in 2015 to oversee the rationalisation exercise carried out by 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) to resolve its debt – were kept in the know of the decision to terminate the agreement with the consortium. 

Again, this could not have been a decision made by civil servants. After all, a key reason why the Bandar Malaysia was sold was to alleviate 1MDB’s debt.

What Zahid said also goes against the flow of all the information emanating from Putrajaya since it became clear that there were major question marks surrounding the ability of IWH-CREC to carry through all their obligations.

At the outset, there was a plan for a multi-million ringgit bash to mark a milestone of Bandar Malaysia on May 3, with several thousand people slated to attend the function.

Then, it was scaled down massively. And then the event was cancelled.

In his statement to the press yesterday, Finance Minister II Johari said the Budiman Committee was disbanded after it had performed several functions related to the rationalisation of 1MDB, including the international bidding process in respect to Bandar Malaysia.

He was offering this narrative to blunt reports that the committee was disbanded as a fallout from the government’s decision to nix the IWH-CREC deal.

Here’s the puzzling thing with the minister’s narrative:  With fresh bids likely to be invited to develop Bandar Malaysia, it is quite clear that a key plan of the 1MDB rationalisation exercise has not been completed.

So it would appear that the Budiman Committee was disbanded because the Finance Ministry wanted to have greater control and oversight over the process to find a new master developer for the Bandar Malaysia project.

The government just didn’t want a repeat of the IWH-CREC mess‎. – May 13, 2017.