PROCES - VERBAL - Malaysia Today

"Wanna Buy a Sub?" (SM Malaisie)it underscores the importance of political connections cin winning a defence contract in Malaysia.Before the French won the contract, submarines hadbeen on the Malaysian navy's wish Iist for almost twodecades. In the 1980s, Malaysia contemplated buyingSweden's Sjoormen-class submarines but the 1986recession stopped the idea in its tracks.In the early 1990s, the navy finally had money tospend. But offshore patrol vessels were then thepriority. In 1995, in Malaysia's biggest-ever defencedeal, a 6-billion-ringgit contract to build 27 craftwent to German ship-builders in a joint venture with aMalaysian firm owned by Amin Shah, a protégé of formerFinance Minister Daim Zainuddin.Submarines returned to Malaysia's radar screen in late1998 when Singapore took delivery of its firstsubmarine--the same Swedish model that Malaysiacontemplated in the 1980s. A submarine force needs atleast five years of training, and the purchase putSingapore far ahead of Malaysia."Singapore has always been our bogeyman," says adefence expert in Kuala Lumpur. "What they buy we'llbuy as well, but a différent variant, and from someoneelse. "Annex' ^.^ .V NkL'O i*: de rté .i .iOther factors made submarines desirable, including the , .2000 kidnapping of tourists from Sipadan Island, offthe Sabah coast, by Abu Sayyaf guerrillas from the ' ,,^r^Philippines Interested foreign 9 p parties, together 9 with ^, ,Seitheir local partners, began jockeying for position.ô "^,^14Defence planners familiar with the deal say that theSwedes were ruled out immediately because they hadsold to Singapore. Dutch Moray-class submarines wereruled out because Malaysia saw them as technicallyunproven. The Dutch were thought to be in the runningwhen, in 2000, Amin Shah shipped two decommissionedZwaardvis-class submarines to his dockyard in Lumut,on Malaysia's west coast, for $10 million. PrimeMinister Mahathir Mohamad even visited Lumut,8br> triggering speculation that the Dutchwould win acontract. They didn't. The two Dutch submarines stillsit in the dock at Lumut.Meanwhile, the private French company Thomson-CSF (nowcalled Thales) had been working with Jasbir Chahl, aIow-profile Malaysian dealmaker, in an attempt to sella Crotale short-range missile defence system to theMalaysian government. (A British firm won the contract