An insight into how things happened!
The very first time I heard about Rare Earth was when there was an announcement about some Mining Giant from Australia investing in a rare earth processing plant in Gebeng, Kuantan, Pahang way back sometime in 2008. A lot of money will be invested over a couple of years to build the plant.
Wow, great I thought. That will surely bring back some life into Gebeng ever since the last Chief Minister of Pahang was promoted to become The Yang Di Pertua Negeri of Malacca which was experiencing some great developments.
Then the European Financial Crisis happened in 2009 and the group of German Bankers that was financing the whole deal pulled back and the whole thing was K.I.V. Sei Loh! The contractors cried. Who are going to pay us?
Then The World Local Bank came in and everything was back to full speed. Everybody was happy. Good times will be back. The good old days of Gebeng when we were invaded by Germans will be here again, only this time there will not be a German Corner in this popular Seafood Restaurant by Balok Beach. This time it will be a Downunder Corner.
Local housing market will experienced a boom as the good old days of charging a Kwai Loh RM 5,000 a month for a furnished double storey terrace house will visit us again. Those Kuantan folks with houses to let out are busy planning to get their properties ready. This included getting rid of those cheap tenants who were always late on their rental.
Then earthquakes hit Japan on 11th March 2011. A tremor of Magnitude 8.9 and the following Tsunamis and news of nuclear plants meltdown and radioactive leakages and contaminations woke me up. Hang on a minute. This Rare Earth processing plant they are building has something to do with radiation, right? Some Thorium something somewhere I read.
Immediately I Googled for Rare Earth and I will not go into the details and all but the point I want to make here is this. Why on earth was this allowed to happen? Why the people we entrusted, the people that were supposed to represent The Rakyat in safeguarding the interest of The Rakyat made such a decision? How did they come to such a decision? What were the deciding factors in allowing a plant that nowhere else on earth will let them operate be build so near other industries and also residential areas?
Was The Rakyat informed about what was coming before things were put to paper? Was there consultation? Were the existing plants and operators in Gebeng consulted? What sort of research was done?
This is what happened according to my IMAGINATION and please do not blame me for going overboard with my imagination as no one responsible for making this decision has come clean about it.
A few years back, in a board meeting of a mining giant multinational ……….
CEO : COO, please update us on progress as to where the heck we are going to process all these earth we have been digging out and piling them so high. It will be higher than Ayers Rock soon. CFO has been on my butt and he cannot kept on weaving his magic telling stories to our bankers to keep on rolling in the money!
COO: China will welcome us but with the conditions they set out, nobody will buy from us. Our own government will give us full backing as long as we do not do it here and not to bring any of the shit back here. For the past 6 months I have been having sleepless night working out a deal with these guys from Malaysia.
CFO: Nice country. Nice people. Quite developed. Read it somewhere they call it Bolehland, whatever that means beats me but let’s hear what you have got for us. I will want the details on the financials. I am no magician, you know.
COO: Boleh means CAN DO in their local lingo. I have been going over there once every few weeks and even arranged for a few of their people over to visit us and have a look at our operations. Amazing country this CanDoLand. Damn friendly people. Let’s get down to details. Look at the map here. Those red lines are what they are allocating us. It is right in a heavy industrial zone. Mainly O&G industries. Port facilities just a stone throw away. Infrastructures all there. All we need is to build the bloody plant and hey presto 18 months to 2 years we will be producing and will be able to market. We definitely can kick some Chinese asses then.
CFO: Tell me what I need to know. HOW MUCH?
COO: Funny that you ask me. That’s the same thing they wanted to know too? HOW MUCH?
CEO: Who are they?
COO: These people I was dealing with. There is this EmBee who has the final say. Then there are the WhyBees. They kept on wanting to know HOW MUCH?
CEO: They did not ask you specific details as to what we are going to be doing over there? You know my concern on this Green thing, the Green Factor that has been crippling us for years now.
COO: Hell no. All they wanted to know was HOW MUCH? They even say they will approve for us pioneer status and we will get tax free for 12 years.
CEO: They did not want to know how much water we need and what we will be leaving behind when we packed up? Since I have touched on the stuff we are leaving behind for them, how big is this land that you have managed to negotiate?
COO: Like I said, they were only interested in HOW MUCH? Anyway, they gave me a few choices and I took the biggest piece with the best infrastructures available. We get access to cheap water and gas. Rough calculation in my head at that time, the size of that piece of land and if we operate at full capacity, we will have to pack up and go in 10 years time. We will not be paying them a single cent in tax. Not a single cent. We get to keep all our profit. I just could not imagine the figures but looking at CFO now, he is all smiles now.
CFO: Cut the crap. You have yet to tell me HOW MUCH it is going to cost us. I still need to lay out the financing. CEO, you better get COO here to give me the numbers before I get over there and strangle him. I do not like his smile either.
COO: Er …. Boss? (Giving CEO a wink!)
CEO: Of course, COO. Ms Dollarmoney, what we will be discussing from this point onwards is STRICTLY OFF THE RECORDS. May I remind you all present in this meeting that from this point onwards, what we discuss here stays here and strictly on need to know basis only. No Q&A session. Just listen. Go ahead, COO.
COO: To close the deal with this EmBee and WhyBees I was left with no choice but to tap into this Slush Fund which was set up primarily to deal with situations like this. Our visionary CEO has foreseen a use for such a fund somehow. I did not even know about it until CEO gave me the green light to close the deal.
CFO: What FUND?
CEO: Tut tut, CFO. No Q&A. Remember? Go on, COO.
COO: Well, the fund was more than enough to cover what we have to do and ……….
The session was off the record, so there were no details available as to what were discussed.
After “off the record” session has ended.
CEO: Let’s get back to operations and implementation. Let’s call this Project CanDoLand. I love this place already. Before we get down to specifics, COO, did you go round the area and chit chat with the locals? I mean, the people surely going to go nuts once they find out what we will be doing in their backyard? I still cannot believe that they let us do this right in the smack of existing industries and their township and plantations are just a stone throw away. You sure they will be no protest later on?
COO: I did my homework, boss. Apparently the people have been conditioned to listen to the government. I mean, they have the same government for more than half a century and that is the only government the people has ever voted. I really do not know how they get away with it but it has something to do with their education system. They are conditioned from young. Anyway, these guys, they said something about the country is suffering from brain drain and what’s left in the country are not so clever and can be easily manipulated. And you know what, they have these Emergency Acts and Internal Security Acts which they can use to lock those clever ones that say too much. They can lock them up and throw away the key without any trial. They told me not to worry. To play safe, I got them to agree on a compensation plan just in case we do not get to operate.
CFO: Please do enlighten me with your savvy negotiation skills, COO.
COO: They agreed to compensate us 3 times the amount of what we have spend if we do not get to operate. I have budgeted about 2 billion USD for this plant so if we do not get to operate, we will still gain 4 billion USD and that will buy us time with the bankers and we go look somewhere else.
And the board meeting went on into technicalities which I am not going to get into.
Purely fictitious and written by AMalaysianFirst for humour only. This does not mean
that the writer does not take a serious stand on what is happening with his and
fellow Malaysians' environment.
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