Sarawak State Assemblymen have got a rare week in session at the moment, enabling a handful of questions to be asked before they are all ushered home again, clutching their allowances to keep rural folk quiet.
Locals by the felled forest that Radiant Lagoon plans to convert to big-agri (once they have profitted from the timber)
Amongst those was a question from state opposition YB See Chee How about the encroachment of an expanding oil palm plantation under the company Radiant Lagoon onto the boundaries of Sarawak’s only UNESCO World Heritage Site, which is Mulu National Park.
The destruction of this remaining area of rainforest to be converted into oil palm sits uncomfortably with recent claims by the federal primary industry minister, Teresa Kok, that oil palm does not cause deforestation.
Local people, who this week protested by once majestic trees felled on their ancestral lands, have every reason to disagree and similar scenes have been played out all over Sarawak for the past four decades, thanks to the land grab policies of present governor and former chief minister Taib Mahmud.
Concession Handed to Taib’s Son for ‘Payment in Kind’
The story behind the Radiant Lagoon concession is, as we have reported, a classic case.
Taib, whilst still chief minister and head of the notorious Land Custody and Development Authority (which he created) presided over the concessioning of this sensitive block of land, linked to both the Berawan and Penan tribes, secretly to his own son Abu Bekir in 2008, for free.
Chris Chung is the agent of Taib’s son Abu Bekir and gave his address as care of Titanium Management, Abu Bekir’s company
The only reason it became public that this four and a half thousand hectares of Sarawak’s remaining forested land had been squirrelled into Abu Bekir’s possession was because Sarawak Report managed to gain access to data from the Land Registry showing to whom concessions were being secretively handed out.
We identified Radiant Lagoon as belonging to Abu Bekir because, along with several other companies owned by him, it was managed by his proxy Chris Chung and was based at the tower block headquarters of Abu Bekir’s company Titanium Management in Kuching.
Company searches confirm that Abu Bekir was the 99% shareholder of the company right up till October last year, when ownership was transferred to the present owners Onlyee Plantations, who have immediately started chopping the trees and converting to oil palm, thereby threatening the peace and integrity of the adjoining Mulu national park, which has till now benefitted from being free from road transportation.
Onlee Plantations have bought the region that Taib’s son received as an unspecified ‘payment in kind’
How come Abu Bekir got the land, one might ask? With whom did he compete for the tender and why were native people kept uninformed of these deals back in 2008? Finally, for how much was it sold to Onlyee last year and under what conditions?
Such information ought of course be totally transparent, not least because the lands involved in any such transactions are often in sensitive areas over which there are native rights. Yet, Taib has consistently kept land deals secret, thereby disempowering the indigenous rights holders by depriving them of crucial information about plans for their lands.
The secrecy has also shielded the Taib family from scrutiny over scores of patently corrupt concessions made out to themselves and their political and business cronies. In the case of Radiant Lagoon, Sarawak Report has been able to determine from the leaked records that the land was in fact granted for free under the pretext that it represented some form of “PAYMENT IN KIND” by the chief minister’s administration to his son.
At the time there was a scandal over a bridge building contract given to the Taib family company CMSB, later partially rescinded, to which this particular concession may or may not be connected. Yet, insufficient transparency makes it impossible to report adquately on the terms of this and similar arrangements, particularly since Sarawak Report has been banned for many years from the state for having reported on native protests against similar landgrabs.
Just one kilometer of bare earth to act as Buffer Zone
Which returns us to the rare opportunity for opposition MP See Chee How to ask a question in the State Assembly about how far Mulu’s UNESCO site was being protected from all the roads and disruption of this new plantation?
YB Encik See Chee How to ask the Minister for Urban Development and Natural Resources: What safeguards are in place to ensure that the logging and plantation activities of Radiant Lagoon Sdn. Bhd. in the vicinity of the Mulu National Park do not breach the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage Convention 1972?
was the question, to which the state environment minister, none other than Taib’s notorious henchman Len Talif Salleh (former head of Sarawak Forestry) replied:
For this particular stretch of boundary between National Park and the PL area, we are going to issue a directive that one kilometer buffer zone will be imposed.
YB See Chee How responded by pointing out that the normal buffer zone for such an area would be 25 kilometers and that a petition of 45,000 signatures has been risen against the destruction of the region, to which Len Talif sneeringly replied that there were no native graves in the area to cause problems and then punned the natives would allegedly be “digging their own graves” if they resisted oil palm, insisting the crop is the only ‘lifeline’ for natives (who have in fact managed to live in the region for hundreds of years without it):
The minister went on to claim that Sarawak has set aside a third of its entire land mass – 4 million hectares – to agriculture of which 3 million is planned to be oil palm and yet, he lamented only 1.6 million has been converted so far, leaving Sarawak with a good deal more logging and converting to do (a prospect that is hugely damaging to the global environment and climate change, since conversion of rainforest to agriculture is one of the worst carbon releasing activities on the planet).
It is notable the present bravado by the Sarawak state government presents a direct opposite policy and intention to the statements made by the popular former chief minister Adenan Satem, who campaigned at the last state election on a platform of freezing logging and halting all further oil palm plantation.
Following the death of Adenan, Governor Taib has clearly got his ‘yes men’ back in control and cashing in what is left of Sarawak’s forests – to hell with the consequences to native people or to Malaysia’s attempts to suggest internationally that oil palm no longer destroys forests and that the country has started on a path towards ‘sustainable palm oil’.
Minister Kok was herself recently forced to modify her attempt to immediately cap further logging, because of the Sarawak state governement’s demands to extend its logging (for the direct benefit of the Taib family and cronies) to at least a further 600 thousand hectares, in contravention of those promises to the electorate.
Federal authorities claim they have only limited control over such rogue state governments, because of their alleged autonomy under the constitution. However, Sarawak Report reminds the present Malaysian government, which was elected on a platform of reforming corruption, that the enforcement of law and order remains a federal responsibility. That includes combatting corruption in high places.
The scandal at Mulu’s borders has not only become a global embarrassment, thanks to the UNESCO heritage status of the area, it is also one more glaring example of corrupt cronyism and land grabbing by the Taib family, which ought to form part of a comprehensive enquiry by Malaysia’s (admittedly extremely overwhelmed) anti-corruption authorities.
Claims that previous enquiries ‘found nothing’ are simply unconvincing when cases such as the vast concessions handed to Abu Bekir are staring the public in the face, thanks to the release of land data that Teresa Kok has insisted ought to be transparent, but which is still only available through leaks, like this one produced by Sarawak Report.
The roads pushed through by Radiant Lagoon have been welcomed by some locals, but will bring destruction with them if logging and oil palm come in their wake
- Sarawak Report
SPRM what are you waiting for?
ReplyDeleteIts overdue. There are thoudands of land grab cases by Taib's family.