EKSKLUSIF : Harta Taib Mahmud di Canada..

Sarawak Report mendakwa Ketua Menteri Sarawak Tan Sri Taib Mahmud dan anggota keluarganya memiliki hartanah bernilai lebih C$100 juta (RM320 juta) di Kanada.

Lamanweb itu mendakwa, ia termasuk kompleks mewah - Preston Square dengan menara kaca kembar yang menyediakan ruang pejabat dan kompleks membeli-belah mewah di wilayah komersial bernilai tinggi di pusat bandar Ottawa.

Menurutnya, dengan menempatkan ruang pejabat syarikat multinasional seperti Xerox, Adobe dan Sun Life, projek tersebut menyediakan sumber kewangan tambahan daripada kutipan sewaan, kepada keluarga Taib.

Projek pembangunan utama tersebut, dakwanya, merupakan 'permata' kepada syarikat pemaju hartanah Sakto Development Corporation, yang dimiliki oleh keluarga Taib.

Sakto mempunyai senarai portfolio puluhan lagi bangunan pejabat dan kawasan perumahan mewah di Kanada.

Ditubuhkan pada awal tahun 1980-an oleh anak-anak Taib - Mahmud Bekir Taib, Jamilah Taib dan adiknya Onn Mahmud, perniagaan keluarga itu dikendalikan oleh menantu Taib - Sean Murray - seorang rakyat Kanada yang berkahwin dengan Jamilah.

Murray dan Jamilah memiliki kediaman kedua termahal di Ottawa - bernilai RM28 juta - yang terletak di kawasan ekslusif Taman Rockcliffe di ibunegara Kanada .

Exclusive – Taibs’ Foreign Property Portfolio

Canadian properties worth in excess of a hundred million dollars

Multi-million dollar complex

Twin glass towers and a swish shopping complex at Preston Square in downtown Ottawa form just part of an enormous foreign property portfolio controlled in Canada by the family of Sarawak Chief Minister, Abdul Taib Mahmud, according to our exclusive investigations.

These buildings alone are worth at least one hundred million dollars and generate a healthy rental income from some of Canada’s top corporations, including Xerox, Adobe and Sun Life, who rent office space and retail outlets. Numerous Canadian Government Ministries are also listed at the building.

Getting Bigger – Commercial Plaza Expansion


Commercial Skyscraper – Ottawa’s ‘Xerox Tower’ Complex.

Sun Life and Adobe are some of the companies

to rent space in this prestige property in Ottawa


Preston Square Ottawa – office space and shops

The Preston Square development lies at the centre of the major Canadian property empire run by the developer Sakto, which was founded in the early 1980s by Taib’s college-aged son Mahmud Abu Bekir Taib, his daughter Jamilah and his brother Onn Mahmud. It continues to be managed as a ‘family business’ by his now son-in-law, a Canadian, Sean Murray.

Taxpayers in Sarawak are entitled to ask how the Chief Minister’s modest 20,000 Malaysian Ringgit a month official salary has managed to help generate a property empire worth so much. It is also well known that the Taib family own further considerable assets in Malaysia and elsewhere.

Dozens more buildings in Canada alone

Adjacent to the Preston Square commercial complex, Sarawak Report has further identified a luxury, multi-story residential building, also constructed by the Taibs and let for rent since 2006. The family have named the building The Adelaide, an Australian city popular with Taib Mahmud and his late wife Laila.

Luxury Living - The Adelaide (left)

Sakto publicity boasts that these ”stylish urban rentals are lavishly equipped” with ”all the elements of contemporary flair” and assure clients that ”all units share the ease of abundant parking and the beauty of Preston’s Square manicured setting”.

Arrogant Admission

We bring these revelations in the wake of the elderly Chief Minister’s admission last week that the Bumi remain ”poor and in difficulty”. In this way, he explained, they can be relied upon to stay ”humble” and continue to vote for Barisan National (BN) at the next election.

Many in Sarawak have questioned why the Chief Minister has done so little to improve the lives of his people during his thirty years in power and where the profits of decades of timber and oil extraction have been spent. Sarawak is Malaysia’s richest state in terms of natural resources and yet remains home to some of its poorest people.

Exclusive revelations show Canadian Government and top corporations rent from the Taibs

Top rents

Sakto Development Corporation was set up in August 1983, according to official Ontario records, two years after Taib Mahmud took power. The Directors were Taib’s brother, Onn Mahmud, Taib’s son Mahmud Abu Bekir (aged just 20) and Taib’s daughter Jamilah, both still students. Three months later Onn also established Richfold Investment Limited in Hong Kong.

He did so on the same day that another company, Regent Star Company Limited, was incorporated with a mutual director, Kin Kwok Shea, at the same office address. It was Regent Star Company which was identified by the Japanese Tax Authorities in 2007 as having received 32 million Malaysian Ringgit in kickbacks from Japanese timber exporters over the preceding seven years covered by their investigation.

The Japanese shipping cartel is known to have been making such payments since the early 1980s, amounting to a total of hundreds of millions of ringgit.

Impressive Investments

Sakto publicity claimed the company invested heavily in its first year(1983), “acquiring over 400 residential units” according to its previous website.

One of the Taib residential properties

Financial records also show that the company invested over $7 million Canadian Dollars during the first twelve months of its activities, $4.5 million of which was raised from its shareholders. In Canada shareholders are allowed to remain anonymous. By the end of its first decade (in 1993) Sakto’s Financial Report shows the company had assets of just under $40 million Canadian Dollars.

Those acquisitions were backed by over $25 million in interest-free shareholder loans, for which “repayment terms had not been established”.

Additionally, Sakto had received a further $3 million in non-interest bearing loans, $1.5 million of which was “payable to a company related to a shareholder”. Among the developments Sakto invested in was the construction of what the company described as a “Class A Office Tower”, completed on schedule and within budget in November 1989.

Known as 333 Preston Street, this building houses the company’s current headquarters. In all but one of those years the company was declaring a loss and not paying taxes.

More HERE