By Emmanuel Samarathisa
SOME of the largest consultancies in the country have been roped in to assist the Ministry of Finance (MoF) with implementing the government’s so-called RM250 bil stimulus package, sources familiar with the matter tell FocusM on condition of anonymity as discussions are private.
Names that have been bandied around include one of the Big Four auditors, Ernst & Young (EY), banking group CIMB Group Holdings Bhd and consultancy Boston Consulting Group, sources said.
Finance Minister Tengku Datuk Seri Zafrul Tengku Abdul Aziz served as CIMB group chief executive officer before accepting the post to lead MoF.
It is understood that the unit for the coordination and implementation of the stimulus package, known by its Malay acronym Laksana, has been staffed with external appointments, primarily from EY with a few from CIMB and the customary representative from MoF.
For Laksana, it is believed that for now the consultants had been seconded to the agency.
But one insider believed that Laksana would be modelled in the vein of the Performance Management and Delivery Unit (Pemandu), when it was an agency under the Prime Minister’s Department, led by then prime minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak.
Some civil servants in MoF have also raised the spectre that “the Pemandu era has returned”. And it is believed that there might be a possibility that the government would allocate a budget to Laksana, just like with Pemandu before it was disestablished on March 1, 2017, where the pay grade would not follow that of the civil servants, with the sum being “five digits no less”. – April 30, 2020
