Sime Darby: what happened after its merger?

Sime Darby announced its long expected demerger, and analysts prepared their reports (here, here and here).

I am sure we will be overwhelmed in the next months by sleak PowerPoint presentations and the like, full with jargon like "unlocking of value", "strategic repositioning", "win-win situations", "maximizing shareholders value", "refocussing exercise" etc.

But ten years ago Sime Darby also went through a large restructuring (the merger with Guthrie and Golden Hope), also with sleak PowerPoint presentations, and the results of that exercise are definitely underwhelming.

Sime Darby's share price has performed very poorly, and is even below the level of 2007:

Most likely that can be explained by looking at the revenue and especially profit numbers over the last five year:

That exercise in 2007 must have cost a few hundred million RM, that is quite a nice and tidy amount of money that could have been spend on something else, possibly more useful.

Before Sime Darby jumps into the next restructure (which again will cost quite a bit of money, I assume), can we please get a honest, hard look at what was promised in 2007, and what actually was achieved in the next ten years? For instance, what happened to the promised synergy and economy of scale? Which party actually benefitted of that merger? Was it may be only the advisors and the bankers who came out ahead, charging juicy fees?

Blast from the Past: the Carrian case (3)

I wrote about this subject before (here and here).

The CIA has recently released files from their archive, and this document (unfortunately a "sanitized" copy) has to do with the Carrian case.

Has anything been learned from this scandal from the past? Looking at the more recent scandals like 1MDB, I strongly doubt it.

BNM takes action against which financial institution?

Article on Bank Negara's website:

Bank Negara Malaysia Takes Enforcement Action Under Financial Services Act 2013

One snippet:


Pursuant to Bank Negara Malaysia’s (the Bank) press release dated 27 December 2016, the Bank wishes to announce that a financial institution has been imposed an administrative monetary penalty of RM1,400,000 for failure to promptly notify the Bank of a significant audit finding in relation to its dealers’ misconduct involving the fixing of the USD/MYR exchange rate.


Why does BNM not simply mention the name of the financial institution? Surely a healthy dose of transparency goes a long way.

AirAsia X: late announcement from Tune Group?

I was looking at Bursa's website to check if AirAsia X had made an official statement regarding the UK corruption case of Rolls-Royce. There was no such announcement, hopefully they will release a comprehensive statement soon.

However, there was another announcement, Tune Group notifying its disposal of 147 Million shares of AirAsia X:

A major shareholder disposing a large chunk of shares, that seems like important news. Why did Tune Group wait almost one month to inform Bursa (and AirAsia X's shareholders) about this disposal?