A PKR leader has blamed the toll hikes of five highways in the Klang Valley on corrupt practices that went unchecked for many years under the concept of Malaysia Inc.

Party treasurer Khalid Ibrahim said the policy has in fact encouraged political patronage as well as unethical collaborations between government officials, politicians and the private sector.

Malaysia Inc was a concept mooted under former premier Dr Mahathir Mohamad's administration to speed up development programmes through closer collaboration between the government and private sector.

It has since been criticised for having encouraged corruption at many levels within the government.

Khalid, a former CEO of Guthrie Group Bhd and Permodalan Nasional Bhd, said while the intentions of Malaysia Inc was noble, it created a culture that accepted corrupt practices as a norm.

"The politicians and civil servants and the entrepreneur will have to work together in order to achieve this so called momentum. This is M'sia Inc," he said at a public forum on Thursday.

Entitled 'Imagine Malaysia without NEP', the forum was organised by Youth for Change (Y4C) and the National Young Lawyers Committee and participated by academic Dr Lim Teck Ghee.

"The Malaysia Inc process has got a lot of attraction, because we cut a lot of red tape. Very soon, a very interesting concept, which I call a win-win-win situation began."

He said the natural tendency was that politicians were looking to sustain their political activities while entrepreneurs were looking to increase their profit margin.

"A win from the point of view of the entrepreneur means more profits. The word used is invest, a very nice word. If I invest then I will get the project, then if my return from the project is substantial then my investment is justified. Then I can give donation to politician friends, so that he can win and I can win. It's very logical. It's partnership. It's not called corruption."

He said civil servants are also known to receive gratuitous study trips abroad by private developers who wanted a particular project approved.

"We didn't realise these people who were supposed to lead the people are just as much human as everybody else," said Khalid.

Declassify agreements

He said Malaysia Inc was to blame for projects such as the toll concession agreements that came under recently after the Jan 1 toll hikes in the Klang Valley. Last week, protesters gathered near the Lebuhraya Damansara-Puchong (LDP) highway to protest the hikes.

"The challenge today is to change the highway toll agreements as the risk and reward are totally in favour of the entrepreneurs. Even Mahathir admitted there were some stupidity involved in the agreements," he said.

Mahathir had recently said that was negligence on the part of the government in their conduct of those negotiations during his tenure at the country's helm.

But Khalid said any change to the agreements needs to be justified by evidence, much of which is still classified. Contents of the agreement are currently kept away from public scrutiny under the Official Secrets Act (OSA).

He blamed the BN government for continuing to deny the public access to the agreements.

"Even the OSA was the relic of the colonial masters, because they don't want you to go tell tales of how the resident general play around with the money," he said.

Khalid said PM Abdullah Ahmad Badawi should declassify the agreements from the official secrets status as thousands of people have already read the documents, thus compromising its secrecy.

"There is no reason whatsoever to keep it as a secret when hundreds, perhaps thousands of people have read the documents. This is so since the agreements was the basis supporting the toll operators' loan applications from banks. Thus, it is in fact a public document that has been read by bank staffs, including foreign ones."

He added that the toll operators would also have to file the documents with the relevant authorities such as the Securities Commission and the Bursa Kuala Lumpur if they raised capital from the local capital market.

Meanwhile, details of the New Economic Agenda (NEA), an affirmative action-based policy coined by Parti Keadilan Rakyat, will be revealed some time next month.

The former industry captain said the NEA, which PKR claims to be non-racial, would serve as a viable alternative to the ruling government's NEP.