Discard the deadwood and privatise MAS before it bleeds to death
My article was earlier published in TheAntDaily.com on 24/6/2014 Hasn’t the BN federal government realised what happened to the country’s national carrier Malaysia Airlines (MAS) after all these years? MAS has been bleeding the past three years. It suffered a loss of RM2.52 billion in 2011, followed by losses of RM433 million in 2012 and RM1.2 billion in 2013. For the first quarter of 2014, MAS recorded a net loss of RM443.4 million and no improvements are expected in the later months or even in the next two years. Its share had also plunged to all-time lows. As we all know, MAS is a government-linked company (GLC) with Khazanah Nasional as the largest shareholder and being a GLC, MAS had proven that it cannot perform at all, as evident from its continuous losses. Khazanah itself has no expertise in running an airline. Furthermore, being the government’s investment arm, Khazanah already has too many GLCs under its care and it couldn’t give its full attention just to MAS. As such, Kha...