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Board members of Petronas stood their ground this week to turned down a bid by Prime Minister Dato’ Najib Razak to admit his key political aide Omar Mustapha Ong as a director of Petronas. The decision made by the Board Members is based on the fact that Omar Mustapha had defaulted on his scholarship loan agreement with Petronas two decades ago.

I am not wrong (according to my senior Zaky of SAMURA), Omar Mustapha was my super duper senior in Sekolah Menengah Sains Muar (SAMURA), Tanjung Agas and considered one of the most success and well known produced by that boarding school. After SPM, I think he went to Oxford to do his first degree in political science with Petronas scholarship. He work briefly in Petronas and another GLC prior joining McKinsey & Co, a London-based consulting company. In 2002, he returned to Malaysia and founded Ethos Consulting with several friends. Subsequently, a few years later was tapped by Najib, who was then the Deputy Prime Minister, to become his special officer.

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For me, the Board members of Petronas has done a good job to turn this down. They must have given deep thought on this, otherwise it’s not easy to reject such order. The issue that I can see is on integrity, you have been sponsored and has service bond, then you fail to fulfill the service period in lieu of that you need to pay certain amount of money. Being a success person like Omar, I simply can’t understand why he did this. Maybe he never thought being proposed to be the board members of Petronas in future.

Lesson learnt I think in this case is better pay your scholarship, this will help few more students to pursue their studies.

You can read more on Omar on his Facebook, Linkedin and ZoomInfo and Ethos

Bro TajudinMS of SAMURA maybe can comment this.

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