In this study of Malaysia’s new political economy, Edmund Terence Gomez unwraps decades of political involvement in the corporate sector, focusing on the omnipresent control of government-linked investment companies (GLICs) through a complex system of power which rests at the apex body that is Minister of Finance Incorporated.

Malaysia possesses a unique history of government–business relationships, spanning from a piece of legislation that permitted the executive to own companies since 1957. The nexus of a variety of ownership methods and directorship ties, as well as bailouts, have ultimately led to the accumulation of corporate wealth in the hands of a mere seven GLICs. A series of events that includes Mahathir Mohamad’s unprecedented move to concurrently take on the role of prime minister and minister of finance has shifted enormous corporate power to the office of the executive.

Profile of the Author
Edmund Terence Gomez is a professor of political economy at the University of Malaya. He previously served as a research coordinator at the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), in Geneva, Switzerland. He specialises in state-market relations and the linkages between ethnicity, politics and business development. He is a senior fellow at the Institute for Democracy and Economic Affairs. His international publications include Malaysia’s Political Economy: Politics, Patronage and Profits (Cambridge University Press, 1997), Political Business in East Asia (Routledge, 2002), The Politics of Resource Extraction: Indigenous Peoples, Multinational Corporations and the State (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), The New Economic Policy in Malaysia: Affirmative Action, Horizontal Inequalities and Social Justice (NUS Press, 2013) and Government-Linked Companies and Sustainable, Equitable Development (Routledge, 2015).