KUALA LUMPUR: Tan Sri Francis Yeoh, managing director of YTL Corp Bhd, says he was not a crony of former Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad.

He also said crony capitalism is a “misperception.”   

Yeoh said this in a letter to the media yesterday to clarify an article on an online portal on Tuesday titled “Crony capitalism in Malaysia has to go, son of YTL founder says”.

The article was written after Yeoh gave a talk on YTL and its family business on Tuesday. The talk was followed by a question-and-answer session.

“When asked if I was a ‘crony’ of [Dr Mahathir] who purportedly awarded us a lucrative independent power plant (IPP) concession, I categorically stated that I was not a crony of [Dr Mahathir]. In everything we did, we introduced innovative ideas to succeed — from unprecedented ringgit financing for infrastructure projects in developing countries to creating the first 15-year bond market and pioneering the IPC listing category in Bursa Malaysia,” Yeoh wrote in his letter to the media.

YTL, under the leadership of Yeoh, started Malaysia’s first IPP after it was given the privatisation award by Dr Mahathir. There was a public outcry when it was learnt that Tenaga Nasional Bhd had to buy power from this IPP at a rate seen as high.

But Yeoh said in his letter: “The title of this article is inaccurate and it does not reflect the content of what I actually said at the forum sponsored by Pemandu.”

He wrote: “I have always been enamoured of the Economic Transformation Programme (ETP) led by our present Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Najib Razak, and transparently articulated through Mampu.”

Giving further clarifications, he said he was responding to an ongoing “misperception” among the audience at the forum that Malaysia practises crony capitalism.

He added: “I made it very clear that the achievements made were not a consequence of crony capitalism. I also wanted to dispel the audience’s misperception that successful businesses in Malaysia are a result of crony capitalism.”

Yeoh said throughout the audience interaction on Tuesday, he had defended the present government’s concerted efforts to introduce more open competition and encourage greater transparency in business.

He said the article’s title completely misrepresented what he had said.

“It automatically presupposes that “crony capitalism” is how things are done in Malaysia. This is far from the truth. In fact, I said I wanted to correct this misperception that has [been] used by various political factions for 20 years.”

Yeoh: In everything we did, we introduced innovative ideas to succeed [such as] pioneering the IPC listing category in Bursa Malaysia.