PETALING JAYA: Against the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic, Sunway Group founder and chairman Tan Sri Jeffrey Cheah highlighted the need for the right policy response to bring the country back onto the recovery path.
“We are at a tipping point – there’s a lot of suffering. In these extraordinary times we need extraordinary policies and support, to spur businesses to reinvest because jobs are lost by the million,” he said during a virtual talk, MIDF Conversations, today.
Cheah shared that he had been in a meeting with Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department (Economy) Datuk Seri Mustapa Mohamed along with business leaders and raised the need for the government’s upcoming budget and initiatives to be different from the previous ones.
He outlined the need for the policies to bring confidence and trust in the government and institutions to get the people united and bring prosperity into the system.
Cheah related that the issue of changes to the Malaysia My Second Home (MM2H) programme was also raised at the meeting, and the minister agreed to look into the matter.
The Sunway chairman said that instead of providing incentives to encourage more applicants, the government added more hurdles.
Cheah shared an anecdote from 1999, when he was courting various fund managers to invest in Sunway. He said the managers pointed out that the government’s track record was bad.
“They told me: ‘You guys tell us to play a game. You change goalposts, never mind, but you are even changing the game without telling us, how can this happen?’”
The current economic environment, Cheah stressed, called for greater motivation, instead of disincentives and cancellations.
“I hope those in charge will think of how the people will be affected by policies. Given the limited funds, we should strategise and get to the root of the problem and help to bring the people up and generate more jobs,” he said.
On this issue, he hopes the government revisits the push towards digitalisation introduced under the previous administrations, reasoning that “we cannot solve a problem with an analog mindset in the digital age”.
“In this age, we need digitalisation,” said Cheah.
