EMBATTLED Felda Global Ventures Holdings Bhd group president and chief executive officer Zakaria Arshad has thrown down the gauntlet to shareholders, telling them to choose him or FGV chairman Isa Samad.

In an interview with Star Biz yesterday, Zakaria said he could not go on working in FGV given the circumstances.

“Shareholders have to decide… either he (Isa) goes or I go,” he told StarBiz just a few hours after receiving a letter yesterday telling him to go on leave pending an investigation related to a subsidiary company of FGV.

 “How to work if he’s (Isa) still there?” Zakaria said. 

“The shareholders can choose either one, they can decide,” he said, adding that the letter did not state how long he has to be away from the office.

Zakaria urged the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) to investigate FGV over allegations of improprieties in the awarding of contracts.

“On paper, everything is above board. I invite the MACC to investigate ... who’s behind all the deals, who are the people we’re giving contracts to, which companies and why only these companies get contracts,” he said.

Isa said yesterday that telling Zakaria to go on leave was to enable FGV’s internal auditing team to further probe into purported irregularities involving deals between FGV subsidiary Delima Oil Products and Afghan company Safitex worth several million ringgit.

He insists that Zakaria was told to resign by the FGV board, and not by him alone, following a series of meetings since May 31.

One of the main justifications for ousting Zakaria is a delayed payments by Safitex, an Afghan company with an array of businesses and headquartered in Dubai, to DOP for a shipment of palm oil in September last year.

Isa claims this delayed payment constituted a lapse in corporate governance.

Zakaria denies such charges.

He said he had managed to turn around the company around by cutting costs extensively since last April by RM130 million resulting in a small profit in the first quarterly results.

“It’s a profit compared with the RM81.1 million loss in the same period last year… I am on track to reach my profit numbers of about RM600 million for this year as promised under the turnaround plan,” he said.

Zakaria said he was not informed of the last three board meetings or given a chance to defend himself.

Zakaria said there had been several occasions where he and the chairman did not agree on the manner in which the company should be managed.

For instance, when he picked an internal candidate to head FGV’s plantations activities, Isa had someone else in mind.

He also said his decisions were overruled by the FGV board twice involving investments such as an additional £100mil (RM550mil) into Felda Cambridge Nanosystems Ltd, a company producing nanocarbons, over the next three to four years and a proposal to invest RM300 million for a 30% stake in a factory in Klang.

Zakaria said the Felda Cambridge Nanosystems had lost RM117 million in the past three to four years and the board’s executive committee agreed to stop the investment but later decided to proceed. – June 7, 2017.