According to a joint NGO statement, which will be released tomorrow, Taib is “one of Asia’s greatest kleptocrats” who has “systematically plundered the rich Borneo jungles for timber”. “Most of the state of Sarawak has been illegally absorbed into the possession of his cronies and family members through ‘privatisations’ and the handing out of palm oil and timber concessions, via arbitrary state acquisitions of native lands.” This has resulted in “environmental destruction, serious human rights violations and poverty.”
Since Taib has come into power in the early 1980s, his family has systematically transferred huge ill-gotten assets into a number of countries, including the UK, Canada, the United States and Australia. It has recently been disclosed that Ridgeford Properties, a developer of London luxury properties, is a wholly-owned Taib family business.
By inviting Taib Mahmud as a keynote speaker, the Saïd Business School is not only offending Sarawak’s native communities and Malaysia’s civil rights movement but is also betraying the Oxford University’s integrity and academic tradition.
It was an Oxford scholar, the eminent social anthropologist Rodney Needham, who first travelled to Sarwak in 1951 to study the Penan, Borneo’s famous rainforest culture. Months before his death, in 2006, Needham signed an affidavit in favour of a Penan land rights litigation, out of concern for what had happened to the Penan as a result of the indiscriminate logging of their forests.
Taib Mahmud, who holds the three key offices of Chief Minister, Finance Minister as well as State Planning and Resource Management Minister of Sarawak, is directly responsible for the destruction of the state’s once rich primeval rainforests. Up until today, Taib is denying the Penan, Sarawak’s poorest inhabitants, all rights over their traditional lands in the jungle.
- Taib Mahmud in a room in House of Lords
- More on the 20 Pykett Avenue land deal
- UK Parliament’s website silent about Taib’s visit
- A tourist’s impressions of Penang
- MPPP pre-empted as building is demolished
- UK all-parliamentary group chief writes to Taib
- Live – Protest in Oxford as Taib Mahmud arrives
