Sometime in the late nineties, the Court of Appeal made an infamous Shakespearean reference in the course of alluding to corrupt judges. The Macbeth line of something being rotten in the House of Denmark was of course, an allusion to the court which was housed in the building in KL known as Wisma Denmark. That case was a high watermark (or more aptly, the low watermark) in judiciary corruption. It was of course, the Ayer Molek Rubber Company case.

I had forgotten most details of the case, when yesterday, someone in KL sent me an email suggesting the matter still has some mopping up to do. I guess it is a way of a certain disaffected bank owner trying to have a go at another (a more pro-establishment) bank. Whatever the motivation, it opened up a cache of unhappy memories for me. Suddenly details of the transaction trickled back into my mind and I have spent my otherwise quiet start to my mornings reading this fellow’s emails, designed to trigger some recollection in my mind. This transaction happened way back in 1994 and the last I had anything to do with it was in 1999, so the trigger needed to be pretty firm and sharp.

Ayer Molek was a clear case of regulators’ unhappy role in deal making. Deal making by its nature entails benefits to both parties. When these benefits and their recipients are multiple, it gets pretty damned close to signs of corruption. How large blocks of shares in a public company can disappear without the owner being traced shows how well Malaysian corporate players can collude. In Malaysia, the modus operandi is always to avoid getting to the bottom of a mess. Just sweep everything into an unseen corner and leave it there. Somehow people expect the mess to have nuclear properties and exude half-lives so that over time, they disappear. They don’t. They remain in some dust collecting corner and someday, someone would come along and dig it up, dust it off and the rot would waft through for all to realise it didn’t work to just “sweep it under a carpet”.

No one wanted to get to the bottom of the Ayer Molek mess. Not when I was still in KL, in the company which was at the centre of the matter. Documents came to me, I could not get proper instructions, and they would bounce right off. Sometimes I had to cut these down to size so that they may be dealt with within the constraints prevailing then. So things chug along. The hewn down documents would again be shoved into some corner until yet another person digs them up. It could be years before that happened. It isn’t my mission in life to wait for such events. I have moved on. Down Under.

What do I do with this request to assist in mopping things up? I don’t know. I couldn’t even recall the relevant details until I was prompted. I can confirm or verify certain facts or documents, suggest some details which I can recall, but that is about all. Ayer Molek was an ugly chapter not just in Malaysian corporate and judiciary history. It was an ugly chapter in my life, too. I spent hundreds of hours on it, often unnecessarily. Others did too. Others wrongly and illegally reaped benefits while people like us are asked to drag ourselves through the quagmires. I think I will cease participating in any way. I think I will say no more.