No delay to NewCo set-up: Khazanah

KUALA LUMPUR: Khazanah Nasional Bhd has assured that the establishment of the MAS NewCo will not be delayed following the restucturing of Malaysian Airlines System Bhd (MAS) and will be operational on July 1, said managing director Tan Sri Azman Mokhtar.
He said there will not be a delay in the operational date of the NewCo despite the effective transfer of employees from MAS to the NewCo only being affected on Sept 1, 2015.
There will also be no revision in its plan to lay off 6,000 staff, maintaining that the NewCo's staff strength will be limited to 14,000, from 20,000 currently.
"MAS is still in a state of serious restructuring … There's no point in us just transferring every thing and in two, three years down the line, we've to pump in another few more billion," Azman told a press conference at the Invest Malaysia 2015 here yesterday.
He said the NewCo CEO designate Christoph Muller will look at the business plan in an integrated way and how to turn the company around.
"In fact the NewCo CEO is accelerating it so there's no delay per se. He's coming in on May 1 instead of July 1. We're actually bringing forward, not back, the appointment of the CEO.
"The only thing that we push (back) slightly is the request of Muller (to have) more time to do the staff assessment. We've done some but Muller wants to go in and personally select and meet the key people in the whole process. That's more operational," explained Azman.
He said one of the 12-point recovery plan was the employee consultative panel (ECP), which was one of the conditions that Khazanah set as the capital provider for the recapitalisation of MAS as well as taking it private.
"We're not able to restructure MAS unless all employees, management and staff come together. I'm sure there are issues. It's not an easy restructuring but the ECP is now mandatory and we insist that this is one of the conditions."
Last month, employee unions banded together to call on Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Abdul Razak to intervene in the MAS restructuring that will see 6,000 workers retrenched.
Meanwhile, the market capitalisation for Khazanah's 20 largest government-linked companies' holdings (G20) has grown 3.2 times from RM133.8 billion to RM431.1 billion for the period between May 14, 2007 and April 7, 2015.
G20's net profit stood at RM26.2 billion for FY14 versus RM26.3 billion for FY13.