This article first appeared in The Edge Malaysia Weekly on April 27, 2026 - May 3, 2026

EARLIER this month, a highly controversial proposal to launch a new system for recruiting workers from Bangladesh was put up for deliberation by the cabinet.

The meeting began with several other matters at hand. However, when the time came to discuss the foreign worker scheme, Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim instructed officials to remove it from the agenda.

“Nobody said a word during the meeting. When the matter came up for deliberation, Anwar just told the officials to take it off the list and go on to the next topic. No reason was given,” says a source.

Several cabinet ministers declined to comment on this when contacted.

Matters related to foreign labour are primarily in the hands of two ministries — the Ministry of Home Affairs under Datuk Seri Saifuddin Nasution Ismail and the Ministry of Human Resources under Datuk Seri R Ramanan. Both Saifuddin and Ramanan did not respond to questions from The Edge on the matter.

Nevertheless, Ramanan confirmed last week following a news report that a new scheme — The Universal Recruitment Advance Platform or Turap — was being considered. The system was proposed by Bestinet Sdn Bhd, a company whose owner is wanted in Bangladesh to face criminal charges.

Ramanan, who said the proposed new system would use artificial intelligence (AI) to cut out the middlemen, dismissed an earlier news report on Turap as being inaccurate and claimed that the matter was not even being deliberated at the cabinet level. Sources insist, however, that the proposal had been fully prepared for discussion at that level.

“Even before the news came out recently, the proposal on the recruitment of foreign workers from Bangladesh was part of the agenda in a cabinet meeting earlier this month. This means it was at an advanced stage. It was the prime minister who took it off the agenda.

If the cabinet had approved the proposal, it would go down to the implementation stage,” says a source.

Former three-term DAP member of parliament Charles Santiago says the exploitation of workers at the village level is the biggest reason for debt bondage. He doubts that any system using AI can resolve the problem.

“Poor villagers are paying the price to come to Malaysia to work. It’s not only the agents that make money; it is an important business for politicians in Bangladesh as well. They feed on the billions that the system churns out.

“So how does any system, even with AI, stop workers at the village level from being forced to pay excessive amounts to agents and sub-agents?” asks Santiago.

Bestinet, controlled by Datuk Seri Aminul Islam Mohd Nor, has defended the Turap system as a solution to eliminate recruitment exploitation at its source — the villages. The company has also said the system complements existing systems and reduces leakages.

Currently, the Foreign Workers Centralized Management System (FWCMS), which was developed and managed by Bestinet, is one of the solutions used to manage the import of foreign labour into the country. The FWCMS is to be replaced by the National Integrated Immigration System (NIISe) by 2028.

Meanwhile, Aminul and an associate, Ruhul Amin, are among those that the current Bangladeshi government is seeking to prosecute for money laundering and exploitation of workers under the previous government. In fact, Dhaka has already sought Aminul’s extradition, though the attempt has not been successful so far.

To get an idea of the scale of this business, one has to go back to 2012, when the recruitment of workers from Bangladesh to Malaysia was strictly a government-to-government (G-to-G) initiative. At the time, a Bangladeshi worker paid about BDT35,000 (US$449 then) to get a job.

According to a copy of the draft White Paper commissioned by the new Bangladeshi government, the G-to-G agreement signed between the two countries was amended in 2013 to allow private recruitment firms to be part of the process. This resulted in the fees borne by each worker skyrocketing to 300,000 Bangladeshi taka (US$3,846) or more.

Today, that fee has exceeded US$5,000 per worker.

In 2023 alone, when there was pent-up demand for foreign workers post-pandemic, over 351,000 workers from Bangladesh arrived in Malaysia, according to documents from that country. Assuming each worker forked out US$5,000, the amount collected by agents at all levels in Bangladesh and Malaysia would have been a staggering RM7 billion.

The Malaysian government has also been drawn into the Bangladesh manpower export controversy due to its decision to award the mandate to handle matters related to foreign labour to Bestinet’s FWCMS solution.

Bestinet came into the picture in January 2018, when the home ministry issued a letter of acceptance (SST) to the company for the use of FWCMS to manage the documentation and registration of foreign workers. The ministry was then led by Datuk Seri ­Ahmad Zahid Hamidi, who is now the deputy prime minister.

The SST issuance to Bestinet has been a matter of deliberation in a Parliamentary Select Committee (PSC) for the last two years.

A senior government official told the PSC that the SST was issued following strict instructions from Zahid to expedite the matter, on the grounds that discussions between the company and the government had been going on for a long time without a resolution.

After the SST was signed off, the home ministry started using FWCMS. The SST was valid for six years and expired in May 2024 without any formal agreement between the government and Bestinet. One of the reasons was because government officials could not reach an agreement with Bestinet over the fees that the company intended to charge the government.

For six years, between 2018 and 2024, the ministry used FWCMS to process documents and issue temporary employment visit passes (Pas Lawatan Kerja Sementara or PLKS) to foreign workers without making any payment to the company.

How Bestinet manage to sustain its operations during the period without getting paid, and why it continued to provide its services to the government, are matters that have not been addressed so far.

Bestinet before 2024 had filed a claim against the government for RM1.57 billion in unpaid services for six years.

The amount is huge, especially for an unlisted company.

As for the FWCMS, the system was never under the complete control of the ministry between 2018 and end-2024. Critical elements, such as the “source code” — the underlying DNA of the software, in simpler terms — were not with the home ministry, and holders of the “SuperID”, which acts as the master key to the solution, were not confined to authorised government staff.

Such elements were crucial to ensuring that only authorised persons could access the system to make changes to approved quotas and issue temporary passes to foreign workers. “Both elements are critical and part of the agreement in end-2024. It is to ensure that there would not be any intrusion by unauthorised individuals into the system,” a senior civil servant had told the Public Accounts Committee back then.

There was at least one incident reported in May 2023 of unauthorised persons approving 24 applications to bring in foreign labour. After investigations, the police concluded that it was a technical error, and the incident was dismissed as there was no case.

A formal agreement between the government and Bestinet was only signed in September 2024, nearly two years after the Anwar government took over Putrajaya. Only after that signing did Bestinet hand over the “source code” to the home ministry, and the “SuperIDs” were finally confined to authorised government servants.

Under this agreement, Bestinet gets RM215 for every PLKS issued. The PLKS is issued to foreign workers within a month of their arrival in Malaysia.

Manpower industry executives believe that work on the Turap proposal started last year. It remains unclear if former human resources minister Steven Sim — currently the Minister of Entrepreneur Development and Cooperatives — was approached over the scheme during his tenure with the ministry, as neither he nor his office replied to queries on the matter.

Ramanan assumed the position of human resources minister last December. In less than two months, he had broached the subject of a new system to recruit foreign workers. Sources say ministry officials have already been given a briefing on Turap, with officials from Bestinet present.

“In the proposal, the recruitment would be confined to 10 companies in Malaysia and 20 in Bangladesh that would act as facilitation centres to help manage the recruitment process using AI,” says a source.

Turap comes amid major developments in Bangladesh on the supply of foreign workers from that country to Malaysia.

Following the fall of the previous Awami League government headed by Sheikh Hasina Wazed, there have been increasing calls for a higher degree of transparency in the recruitment of workers from the country. In particular, manpower groups in Bangladesh have been pressuring the new government to allow more recruitment companies to participate in the programme to send workers to Malaysia, from the present 102 firms.

They contend that the current system, crafted in 2021, has contributed to workers paying more to recruitment firms because only 102 companies are recognised by the FWCMS solution. On that score, the Ministry of Expatriates’ Welfare and Overseas Employment of Bangladesh submitted a list of 426 recruitment companies to undertake worker recruitment, says an executive in the foreign worker recruitment business.

“The list was submitted to (former human resources minister) Sim in November last year. It excludes the old recruitment companies selected under the 2021 agreement between Malaysia and Bangladesh,” says the executive.

On Malaysia’s side, the entry of foreign workers from Bangladesh has been frozen since end-2024. Home Minister Saifuddin imposed the order after many arrivals were left without jobs.

The last memorandum of understanding (MoU) signed between the governments of Malaysia and Bangladesh in December 2021 was for the entry of 220,000 workers up to 2026. But in 2023 alone, 351,000 workers from the country came into Malaysia, far exceeding the permitted number.

The MoU signed in 2021 is expiring at the end of this year. The current Bangladesh government is waiting for Malaysia to open the doors to its workers, but it wants a bigger pool of Bangladesh recruitment companies involved.

As for Malaysia, it is looking at a new system that potentially involves fewer companies and with Bestinet playing a role, according to industry officials.

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