Daim Zainuddin: opaque to the end

 

From Terence Netto

Fabulously wealthy Daim Zainuddin has passed away at the age of 86, some 40 years from the time he ascended to the post of finance minister and began a partnership with Dr Mahathir Mohamad during which time he became intriguingly powerful.

You can be sure his supporters will be lavish in their praise of his contributions to the economy, while his critics will be circumspect in what they say because Daim operated in a zone of opacity.

A penchant for reticence even when seeking out people whom he tapped for ideas or information reinforced the aura he disbursed around him.

The novelist John Le Carre’s creation, the spy George Smiley, comes to mind as a parallel: Daim was similarly self-effacing and reticent.

Smiley wore his reticence and self-effacement as cover for cunning and ruthlessness about goals.

Surprisingly for a man of capitalistic instincts, Daim cultivated friends of leftist persuasion — the journalist A Samad Ismail, and lawyers T Gamany and James Puthucheary, the last-named a ready source of ideas on how to drive the moribund Malay economy.

Daim would plant himself in Puthucheary’s digs in the law firm, John Skrine and Co., in Kuala Lumpur in the early 1970s to glean ideas on what should be done to kickstart the Malaysian economy in the aftermath of the May 13, 1969 riots.

“You are muscles and I’m the brains,” Puthucheary would twit the young lawyer and neophyte property developer.

When, in 1984, Daim tried to reward Puthucheary for his beneficence by retaining him as counsel in the sale of United Malayan Banking Corporation shares that he owned and needed to divest on becoming finance minister, the Skrine partner declined because he viewed the sale as suspect due to a conflict of interest.

It is believed Daim was close to Singapore’s former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew with whom he consulted and corresponded.

He would visit Samad Ismail in the latter’s Petaling Jaya home to chat and show Samad letters from Kuan Yew.

Samad told this reporter that Daim was intrigued that Samad had in Singapore in the mid-1950s been a political associate of Kuan Yew’s before they had a bitter parting of ways.

It is believed Daim sought Kuan Yew’s advice on how to proceed in the case against Anwar Ibrahim, when the latter was sacked from the deputy premiership and deputy presidency of Umno in September 1998.

Through all this variety of contacts and consultations, Daim moved with an opacity that made him hard to pin down.

Although he worked closely with Mahathir, he was not a clone of the prime minister.

They were at cross purposes in 2000 when Daim was seen as moving his proxies into key positions in the public and private sectors only for Mahathir to countermand his lieutenant when it seemed that Daim had overstepped his bounds.

Daim was obliged to defer to the wily older man, a shrewd deployer of stratagems who always held the trump card in dealings with friend and foe.

A book of their relationship, in the confessional mode, would bust sales records.

Daim is supposed to have written a memoir. This was long rumoured, so long in fact it is doubtful it would be revelatory and unvarnished.

Someone who revelled at being opaque is not going to let it all hang out at the end.

For a life this intriguing deserves a narrative that diminishes myth and assists the historical record. - FMT

Terence Netto is a senior journalist and an FMT reader.

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.