KUALA LUMPUR: Minister in Charge of Key Performance Indicators (KPI) Koh Tsu Koon today defended his colleague Idris Jala over what appears to be a rift between the latter and the Treasury.
The Treasury had openly disputed Idris' government subsidy figures.
Idris, who is the chief executive officer of Performance Management and Delivery Unit (Pemandu), had said that Malaysia will go bankrupt by 2019 if it maintains its hefty subsidies.
Government spending on petrol, electricity, food and other staples, he said, had cost the country RM74 billion last year while the Finance Ministry claimed that it was only RM18.6 billion.
However, Koh said the discrepancy in the subsidy figures given by the Treasury and Pemandu is due to the differences in the definition and classification of expenditure and their sources.
"The Treasury's figures refer only to direct subsidies, involving only the Treasury, while those of Pemandu's include all indirect subsidies and from public sources," he explained.
Koh is the chairman of Pemandu.
The figures given by the Treasury was quoted in a briefing for Barisan Nasional backbenchers in Parliament yesterday.
"The Treasury's figure did not include the petroleum subsidy of RM12 billion by Petronas as the Treasury considered that it was not borne directly by the government," said Koh.
"Another example of this is that the Treasury figures did not include the subsidy for the total cost of education which is taken into account by the Pemandu figure," added the senator.
Malay opposition to the NEM
Idris and Koh are leading Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak's Government Transformation Programme and its shift towards a neo-liberal economic paradigm under the New Economic Model.
This means opening up the economy and abolishing Bumiputera quotas in key sectors to charm foreign investments.
They have made enemies among the conservative Malay business elite, including influential former Malay leaders from the government's economic department who want race based affirmative actions maintained in the new model.
The open contradiction of Pemandu's figure is seen as a spillover from the widespread disapproval of the NEM.
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