I refer to Amateur Economist's letter in which he said that he was stumped by the remarks given by the Proton chief executive officer. I, too, almost fell off my chair when reading this CEO's comments about the auto industry in Malaysia.

Here is a person who heads a company that has been ripping off Malaysians for two decades and he has the cheek to ask for more! Lately, I notice a lot of hot air coming from the Proton headquarters but basically they all mean the same thing in that the company wants more subsidies and mollycoddling from the government and the Malaysian public.

The Proton CEO says that the country is losing because the competitors are not playing fair and that they are under declaring their cars' value resulting in the country collecting less tax.

What he fails to say is that for the last 20 years, Proton has not been paying the tax others have been paying, and even under the Afta regime, they still get away with a rebate from excise duties.

The country has lost billions of ringgit in providing these subsidies to Proton and yet we find Thailand way ahead of us in both automotive technology and volume of business. Mind you, the Thai people did not have to pay a single baht for this.

The price that we pay merely to call a Mitsubishi transplant a 'national car' is too much. Even if it's our home grown technology (which it isn't) the price is still too high. The whole Proton project merely fed one person's huge ego, that's all.

To the Malaysian public, my advice is not to listen to self-serving officials who head companies that should not have been set up in the first place. Their objective is merely to sustain their position until they retire.

To me, enough is enough, and we should move on and provide the best for all Malaysians and not just for a few free loaders who pretend to be nationalists.