SELANGOR Menteri Besar (chief minister) Abdul Khalid Ibrahim was in Singapore was in Singapore on Monday to meet the Republic's water agency PUB, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong at the Istana, and to deliver a talk at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS) on Malaysian politics.
At the Istana.
ST Photo: Desmond Lim
I had a short interview with him during lunch at a hotel and attended the ISEAS talk, and came away learning quite a few new things about him.
For one, he is not any more the Malaysian corporate tycoon that many people in his country knew him so well for.
For a long time, he was the friendly face of Permodalan Nasional Bhd, the Malaysian government's equity fund (1979 to 1994).
In 1981, he became a household name after leading the so-called "dawn raid" on the London Stock Exchange that led PNB to gain a 51 per cent stake in then-British plantation concern Guthrie - all within a matter of hours. The company became Kumpulan Guthrie.
He later became the much-reported CEO of Kumpulan Guthrie, the giant palm oil grower and property player (1995 to 2003). And his name was often bandied about as a poster boy of the Bumiputera policy.
Then, he retired after a big row with Guthrie over share allocations for him as "promised" by the government.
But he was out of the public eye for only a short while, as he was soon persuaded by opposition chief Anwar Ibrahim to jump into politics.
In the short two to three years that he had immersed himself fully into the rough and tumble of politics, he has morphed (though maybe not as fast as he would have liked) into a surefooted politician.
As he said, his wife told him there is an easy solution to all his current political woes. "You just resign and we enjoy ourselves," the 62-year-old said at ISEAS, to much laughter from the audience of some 100 people in the hall.
He didn't think that was a good solution and said he has to prove to the public that the Pakatan Rakyat government - formed by an alliance of three Federal opposition parties - "could perform better than Barisan Nasional".
It was not the first time that I had interviewed him.
The first time was in the early 2000s when he was chief executive of Guthrie (now merged with Sime Darby). At that time, Guthrie had just bought some 200,000 acres of palm oil land in Kalimantan and Sumatra and I was doing a story on companies spreading their wings abroad as growth in Malaysia slowed.
I also covered the April 2007 by-election in Ijok, Selangor, where Tan Sri - then the new secretary-general of PKR - was contesting as a candidate.
He lost narrowly even if he did lose a few kilos during the campaign walkabouts. One vivid memory of Ijok for me was seeing him walking with Anwar Ibrahim at an afternoon market, shaking hands and smiling with traders and residents, and later using a hanky to mop his forehead. He looked a bit bewildered by politics then.
Not anymore. Weeks after he was sworn into office as Selangor Menteri Besar, around April last year, I was at a big press conference when he spoke with some caution as the new CEO of Malaysia's most industrialised and richest state.
Then on Monday, when I interviewed him, and later watched his ISEAS appearance, I could see that a different man had been moulded over time.
He was much more confident delving into political issues, launched with gusto into his big plans for Selangor, and rattled off numbers quite easily.
And he wants to expand transportation system for Selangor including the extension of the LRT system.
Then there is the plan to upgrade and replace water assets. Another is urban renewal activities with focus on redevelopment of slum areas including in the Selangor townships of Petaling Jaya and Klang.
In other words, despite having done much in his 62 years, he wants to tackle more big-ticket issues.
As he said, the BN government would dearly love to see him fail, as he is a major opposition leader at the Federal level.
Yet, BN also knows that if he fails as Selangor Menteri Besar, the whole country will suffer. This is because Selangor provides the biggest chunk of the country's growth and revenues to Malaysia.
Talk about having his work cut out for him. At age 62.