This article first appeared in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on December 9, 2024 - December 15, 2024
In my chats with young journalists in and outside of The Edge, I remind them to push their luck when seeking interviews with important personalities, including those who are reclusive or prefer to keep a low profile. One never knows if one does not try. Maybe some of them will just take a liking to you.
When I made the oil and gas (O&G) sector my beat — or area of specialisation — at Business Times, there was a change of the guard at national oil corporation Petronas. Two stalwarts, chairman Raja Tun Mohar Raja Badiozaman and president and CEO Tun Abdullah Mohd Salleh, retired in February 1988 to pave the way for the entry of Tan Sri Basir Ismail and Tan Sri Azizan Zainul Abidin.
The then prime minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad felt that Petronas, while it had progressed well since its inception in 1974, had not moved fast enough to meet the new challenges posed by the industry and the threat of globalisation. Mahathir wanted both Basir and Azizan to inject new ideas and add more entrepreneurial stewardship into the organisation.
Basir was already a well-known corporate personality and a banker but when it came to Azizan, the question often asked was, “Azizan who?” At New Straits Times’ library, the file on Azizan — the low-profile civil servant who served three prime ministers, including Tun Hussein Onn and Tun Abdul Razak, as principal private secretary — was wafer-thin. Newspaper clippings were limited to a few stories of his appointments in the civil service. For journalists, this was a file that remained unsolicited in the NST library.
For someone whose career included a stint with the Malaysian External Intelligence Organisation (ME10) — the country’s equivalent of Britain’s MI6 — Azizan shunned publicity, but once appointed as president and CEO, he had to be the face of Petronas.
His appointment coincided with the flurry of exploration activities off the coast of Peninsular Malaysia, Sarawak and Sabah, where production-sharing contracts (PSC) with American, European, Japanese and South Korean companies, among others, were signed nearly every other month.
Azizan’s exposure to the media was mainly through press conferences conducted after the PSC signing ceremonies at Petronas’ old headquarters at Dayabumi. An exclusive interview with him was still a rarity. My relationship with him then was as a journalist asking questions during press conferences.
Pushing my luck, I put in requests for a one-on-one interview, which I finally got one day. From then on, there were many more exclusive interviews carried out for Business Times and The Edge.
Azizan passed away in July 2004. Sometime in December that year, then Petronas president and CEO Tan Sri Mohd Hassan Marican asked me to write a biography of Azizan. I was reluctant, as writing a book while working full-time as a journalist was a daunting task.
But what prompted me to take on the writing job was that if someone else had written the biography, it could have included some of the interviews I had done. I could not stomach the idea that my interviews could remain as footnotes in a book on Azizan written by another writer.
Once I decided to take on the task and was given the green light by my editor-in-chief Ho Kay Tat to fast-track the writing journey, I came up with the storyboard first, figuring out the possible chapters.
This was followed by a list of interviews starting with family members, close school and university mates, friends in the civil service, and professionals within Petronas and the O&G industry.
Then there was the “must-have” list of interviews, including those with Mahathir, former prime minister Tun Abdullah Ahmad Badawi — Azizan was his immediate superior when they served in the National Operations Council set up in the aftermath of the May 13, 1969 racial unrest — and Basir, which would further strengthen the content of the book, The Quintessential Man: The Story of Tan Sri Azizan Zainul Abidin.
Then I had a wish list of interviews, which I thought would be near impossible to obtain but if I could land them, would give the book some exclusive content. After all, if you don’t try hard enough, you will never know whether you will get the interviews.
One interview was with Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, who in the mid- to late-1980s was the chairman and CEO of the Shell group of companies in Malaysia. He rose in the Shell hierarchy to become the chairman of the Royal Dutch/Shell Group in 1998.
By the time the book project was on, Moody-Stuart had left Shell but was still active in the corporate world. He was then the chairman of Anglo-American plc, a global mining and natural resources company.
He was willing to do an email interview. On Azizan, who was posthumously awarded the title of Tun, this was what he had to say: “Azizan contributed a spirit of integrity throughout Petronas. He also defended Petronas from many efforts to use it as a vehicle to save and hide basket cases. This allowed Petronas to concentrate, for most of its part, on its main business.
“As a person, he was quiet and modest but one with steely determination and absolute integrity. As a professional manager, he led by example without seeking the limelight, cautiously examining the alternatives without losing the big dream. He had strong consideration for others. A committed Malaysian … and I would trust him absolutely.”
The other interviewee was Tatparanandam Ananda Krishnan, one of Malaysia’s richest people, a reclusive corporate figure who stayed away from the limelight and shunned the media. AK, as he was popularly known, passed away on Nov 28.
The interview
Ananda was in the interview wish list because he had known Azizan since Abdul Razak’s premiership and had worked closely with him to develop the former Selangor Turf Club into the Kuala Lumpur City Centre (KLCC), which houses the Petronas Twin Towers, the tallest building in the world from 1996 until 2004. Today, it remains the tallest twin towers in the world.
Ananda, who was also in the O&G business from early on, was one of the advisers to the government in the setting up of Petronas, and served on its board from 1984 to 1986. During this period, Azizan was also a board member in his capacity as the secretary-general of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry.
An exclusive interview with Ananda would certainly add weight to the biography, but would he talk to me? My gut feeling was that it was unlikely but it was time to push the journalist’s luck button again.
A simple email request to his secretary Theresa Ng was met with a surprisingly quick reply, in which she indicated that “Mr Krishnan will see you.”
The interview was set up for Nov 30, 2005, which was my birthday, and I was on annual leave, as usual. A holiday had been planned but I cancelled it — it was a rare opportunity that should not be missed. Ananda also consented to me bringing two friends — Rashid Yusof and Norzuhaira Ruhanie, who were taking a break from journalism and helping with research work for the book.
On the day of the interview, we were ushered into a small meeting room, which comfortably seated four people, at the office of his flagship holding company Usaha Tegas Sdn Bhd in Maxis Tower, KLCC.
He came in, greeting us with a gracious smile. Warm and inviting, Ananda looked smaller in person than in photographs, but his charismatic aura was strongly evident.
Dressed casually, he personally served us tea and coffee. There were no helpers in the meeting room. Crossing to the coffee table at the side, he pointed to a cake, emphasising that it was home-baked and that he had prepared it earlier. He cut it into slices and placed them on our plates. The imposing figure had turned charmer and this put us at ease.
Before talking about Azizan and the O&G scene, Ananda became the interviewer, asking us a lot of questions about the media industry. It caught me off guard but it was not surprising as he was in the media business too. He owned Astro, the country’s largest streaming TV and radio operator, and satellite and telecommunication companies. He talked about the print media and sought our views on it.
It then struck me that there were rumours that Ananda was looking into buying a newspaper, which was likely to be Malay Mail. I replied that there was always room for a niche print publication, just like The Edge, despite the fast-progressing internet and online technology, which had had a huge impact on traditional print publications. Malay Mail, for example, could be turned into a city-based community/business/sports paper for the Klang Valley, I said.
During the interview, he gave some background on the setting up of Petronas, and that he had proposed that Pernas, which was established after the New Economic Policy (NEP) was launched in 1970, play an important role in the O&G business, which could help the bumiputera community address the wealth gap.
Prime minister Abdul Razak, however, was of the view that Pernas should not be the major beneficiary of the nation’s hydrocarbon resources even though it would have helped speed up the distribution of wealth to the bumiputera community in accordance with the NEP, an economic plan that he had formulated.
Ananda said: “Razak decided that oil and gas resources [should] be developed by a national oil company (Petronas), which would be managing the nation’s wealth. If he had not made this decision, the corporate equity share of the bumiputera today would have shot up tremendously. Today, every ethnic group is the beneficiary … of what I thought was an extraordinary gesture on the part of Razak.”
On Azizan being the right person to head Petronas, despite his being a civil servant, Ananda saw him as the perfect link between Petronas and the powers that be. “Azizan was a humble guy. He was close to and had access to Mahathir, who encouraged Petronas to venture out and be brave. If there was any problem, he could go and talk to him. The thing about Azizan was that he had enough confidence in his relationship with Mahathir to say ‘no’ to him. To be able to say ‘no’ and at the same time maintain a good relationship with the prime minister … there has to be leadership.”
On Petronas, Ananda — an experienced oil trader who had companies involved in exploration, production and shipping — was of the view that: “In the oil and gas business, most companies can afford a few mistakes. But Petronas has amazingly made very few mistakes in terms of judgment, where to go and when to buy. I am pleasantly surprised by how successful they have become. In the oil exploration business, if you keep finding oil most of the time like Petronas has been doing, you will have to admire those behind it.”
When it came to KLCC, because of its massive scale and cost, Ananda was thinking of bringing in foreign partners but considered Mahathir’s proposal to share the development of the land with Petronas, to which Azizan agreed.
“We were starting to go ahead with the project with a major foreign partner but it was felt that we should consider otherwise. Mahathir’s view on this was quite strong.”
Mahathir did not want this piece of prime land in the heart of Kuala Lumpur to be developed by foreigners even if it was on a joint-venture basis. The message from the government was that nobody from Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, the UK or the US should partly own KL’s jewel in the crown. As there were not many local developers with deep pockets then, Petronas, which was planning to build a new headquarters elsewhere in the city, was roped in as a partner.
As we covered the questions that we wanted to ask, Ananda became personal and talked about what made him happy. Among them was seeing typical hard-working Malaysian parents with their children happily having lunch or dinner at fast food restaurants or in the park. Perhaps it was something that he missed doing with his three children when they were young.
As we were about to leave, Ananda asked, “Do you know why at the beginning of the interview I asked a lot of questions on the media?”
“No, Mr Krishnan,’ I replied.
His answer: “If you as a journalist do not know enough about the industry you are in and have a good discussion on it, I would not have spent more than 15 minutes of my time with you.”
The astute billionaire and reclusive businessman who had earlier charmed us had spoken.
Azam Aris is an editor emeritus at The Edge
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