TIGERTALK Older jungle prowlers will no doubt remember one of the more famous of petrol advertisements in those days of yore. This was Esso’s (now ExxonMobil) tiger, cutouts of which were placed strategically at the gas stations decades ago to entice customers.

Well, you know what tigers are famous for - power, grace, smoothness, fluidity, poetry in motion - Tiger that I am I will stop myself right there before I get carried away. The idea was if you put a tiger in your tank, you get all those great qualities of the tiger in your car’s performance.

Yes, we know all advertising stretches it a bit with its imagery, but that’s what it is about, isn’t it. It was catchy and something the Malaysian public could identify with - after all what’s there not to like about a tiger, even if I say so myself, especially the Malayan variety.

(Unfortunately, Esso and its tiger have exited the retail sector in Malaysia to be replaced by Petron of the Philippines, yet another case of tiger threatened!)

Ah, but I digress, a rare thing for a tiger unless it is on a strange and unusual hunt and takes a roundabout route for the kill. So why should Petronas, our national oil corporation, put a tiger in its tank? Where will it get Petronas to? I trust the answer will be evident in the next few paragraphs, so stay with us. This advertising and promo thing just seems to have got under my skin today.

It was perhaps just two weeks ago that Petronas reported its results for the first quarter of this year. The results themselves were not significant - they were flat .

What I found interesting was the bizarre defence of its reporting standards.

Some excerpts: “I don’t need to call for a media presentation today, for example, but we do it …. Petronas is not a public-listed company but we have to be accountable and that’s what we are doing now,” Petronas president and CEO Shamsul Azhar Abbas told a press conference, after announcing the company’s financial results for the first quarter of this year.

He added that Petronas aspired to meet the disclosure standards of multinational oil giants such as Shell, ExxonMobil Corp and BP, and that goal has been reached. “That’s the standard we basically aspire to and I think we have arrived,” Shamsul said.

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