Economy
Dirty money? The ‘corrupt’ Malaysian pollie who bought into Adelaide Uni
Australian universities have been confronted with a new cautionary tale about the perils of accepting donations from potentially corrupt foreign officials.
Adelaide University named its forecourt in honour of alumnus Taib Mahmud — the controversial Governor of the Malaysian state of Sarawak in 2008. It has now stripped him of that honour — but declined to return $400,000 he donated.
Taib served as Sarawak’s chief minister for over 30 years until 2014 when he became the Governor of the state, located on the island of Borneo. Taib’s extended family is widely known to be involved in massively corrupt logging activities across the state and the forced dislocation of indigenous communities.
Documents from 2006 sent from the United States embassy in Malaysia to the US State Department — published by Wikileaks in 2011 — state:
>“Sarawak state government remains highly corrupt and firmly in the hands of its chief minister … Taib and his relatives are widely thought to extract a percentage from most major commercial contracts — including those for logging — awarded in the state.”
In 2013, an investigator from Global Witness, a non-government organisation against environmental exploitation, posed as a businessman wanting to buy land in Sarawak. He secretly filmed members of Taib’s family promising they could get Taib, then-chief minister, to expedite government logging approvals for him in return for bribes.
Taib graduated from Adelaide University with a law degree in 1961. He was a student under the Colombo Plan, a Cold-War era scholarship program for students from Asia to study in Australia.