Malaysia has attracted investments worth RM11,338 million during the first eight months of this year, the finance ministry said in Parliament today.

The ministry's parliamentary secretary Hashim Ismail said 495 applications for investments have been received from local and foreign companies. Of the total, 67 percent or RM7,601 million is from foreign investment and the remaining 33 percent or RM3,737 million is from local companies.

Hashim said the Sept 11 terrorist attacks on the United States have changed the entire global economic scenario and will lead to world recession if uncertainty persisted. This, he said, was because the amount of capital investment from the US, Korea, Japan and Singapore make up more than two-thirds of the foreign investment applications.

Conducive investment climate

"However, it is too early to tell if the attacks have a bad impact on foreign investment but we expect it will be serious as the US contributed to 24.3 percent of the total applications for investment during the past eight months," he said.

Hashim was responding to a question by Raja Ahmad Zainuddin Raja Omar (BN-Larut) who asked the ministry to state how the impact of militancy and threats of national security can affect foreign investment in the country.

He said political stability and peace are very important factors for a conducive investment climate.

These factors contribute to Malaysia's capability to attract foreign investment "when other countries around us are in a chaos", Hashim said during the question-and-answer session.