Msa National Discharge: Fill & Download for Free

Why would a divorced couple remarry whilst having irreconcilable differences?SIA and MAS were once MSA, one of the last vestiges connecting both countries post-Singapore independence.SAYING NO TO SINGAPOREDr Goh Keng Swee, Singapore’s deputy prime minister, asked if I would serve as chairman of Malaysia-Singapore Airlines (MSA). The Malaysian Government had proposed Dr Lim Swee Aun, the former Minister of Commerce and Industry, who had failed to get re-elected in the elections of May 1969. “We do not like him,” said Keng Swee. “But he’s not a bad fellow,” I replied. “Oh, never!” thundered Keng Swee. I said, “No, no. I’m overworked and underpaid by my own company.”I was joking, though it was true that I hardly had a moment’s rest in those days. I told him I couldn’t take the job, because I didn’t have the time to do it justice and didn’t know the airline business. I don’t think anybody had talked to Singapore Government leaders like that. They were already known to be very fierce. As I walked towards the door, Keng Swee said, “Well, you know there are hardly any links left between Malaysia and Singapore. If you don’t want to serve, then this link will also go.” It was just like a scene in a Hollywood film. Two steps from the door, I wheeled around and asked, “Are you telling me that if I take the job, that link will be preserved?” “Yes.” Again, I felt I had no choice. “If I agree to take the job, what do I need to do?” “Simple things. First, go to see Tunku Abdul Rahman and [Deputy Prime Minister Abdul Razak Hussein] and tell them we gave you an indication that you’re acceptable to us.” “You mean I have to sell myself to my own leaders?” When he replied in the affirmative, I said, “Give me time to think about it. This is getting very sticky.”So I went away and called up mother. I explained the situation to her. She said, “Well, if you can help preserve the link, then do it, but for one term only.”We belonged to a generation when Malaya and Singapore was one homogenous territory, and felt very strongly that ties should be preserved. So I called Keng Swee and told him that, subject to securing approval in Malaysia, I was prepared to accept the MSA chairmanship for one three-year term. A day or two later I made appointments in Kuala Lumpur and went up.Relations between Singapore and Malaysia have always been uneasy. I saw signs even during my Raffles College days. Nine out of every 10 students from Singapore could be called city-slickers. They were keen to know who your parents and grandparents were, and whether they were rich. By and large, those students who came from Malaya had rural backgrounds. They were usually very charming and uninterested in your wealth or status in life. They were at college just to study and to make friends.Those of us Chinese from Johor had learned to live much more comfortably with Malays. There was far more give and take. Now relations between Singapore and Malaysia were strained. Singapore felt that I could play a diplomatic role; they knew that I was well connected with the Malaysian Government. I was in Raffles College when Razak was there. In fact, I think two-thirds or three-quarters of the top civil servants in Malaysia had been at Raffles College when I was there; many of the others were in school with me in Johor Bahru.I first went to see my very close friend Tun Ismail in Kuala Lumpur. He said, “Robert, if you’ve decided to take it on, take it on, but I don’t know whether you can push it through with Tunku.”I went to Tunku’s house at 9am and was kept waiting for about half an hour. He was a late starter. Then Tunku emerged – it was a big, rambling house – and entered the living room where I was waiting. “Ah, Kuok, Kuok. I know you. Your brother [Philip] is one of our ambassadors.” I said, “Yes, Sir.” “What’s this about?” he asked. “You want to become Chairman of MSA?” I responded, “It’s not that I want to, Tunku …”He didn’t sound too enthusiastic about my taking on this role. He made some remarks about the problems he was having with Singapore. I kept quiet, since it was not for me to say anything. Then I prodded him a bit. “Sir, do you mind if we come back to the subject?” In the end, he said, “OK, Kuok. If you want the job, take it. It doesn’t matter to me.” So I accepted the position of Chairman of MSA.THE JOB – AND THE BICKERING – BEGINSThe board of 15 directors comprised one chairman, four directors nominated by the Malaysian Government, another four by the Singapore Government, one director from Straits Steamship (then a British shipping company controlled by Blue Funnel Group), two directors each from British Airways and Qantas Airways and the managing director, who was on loan from British Airways.So there were six white men, eight Malaysians and Singaporeans, and myself, a Malaysian. You couldn’t have had worse bickering than between the Singapore and Malaysian Government-nominated directors. If one side raised a point and asked for a resolution to be passed, the other side would object. Each side tried to peel off the skin to see what hidden agenda existed under that resolution. The meetings would start at 9:30am, and quite often I couldn’t wind them up until 7:30pm, this at a time when I was in the thick of my sugar business. I was fortunate that my health held up. I was not just chairman of the Board. I constantly had to make peace between the directors from the two governments. I tried every fair and reasonable device I could think of. The evening before a board meeting, I would host a dinner for just the eight government directors and the company secretary.During dinner I would work on them to make peace. “Tomorrow, these are the thorny items on the agenda,” I would explain. “Please try to understand both sides.” Sometimes, I would obtain a semblance of agreement, only to have bickering erupt at the board meeting the following day. The articles of incorporation granted each of the eight a veto, so I was running a company with eight vetoes. It was horrendous! But I stuck with it for nearly two years. I should mention that some of the conflicts I had were with one Western director in particular. When I was chairman, the managing director and CEO was David Craig, who came from British Airways. I had acrimonious exchanges with him. He tried very hard to ingratiate himself into the good books of the Malaysian directors, since the Singapore directors were very rigid and severe managers.EXPENSIVE EUROPEAN EXPATSWhenever David wasn’t performing, they were severe, and so he ran to the Malaysian side for protection. He found the Malaysian directors by and large convenient pillars behind which he could hide. I tried to haul him out from hiding, and our relationship soured. One day, I was in the MSA office on Robinson Road in Singapore, which was a much grander office space than my own humble sugartrading cubbyhole. David spoke to me about engaging expensive European expatriates for the airline. I asked what was wrong with engaging pilots from Burma, which at that time, under the military regime of Ne Win, was training pilots and sending some of them to aeronautical schools in England. He retorted, “Oh, no, no. Only British pilots are safe.” I pointed out that some of our commanders here were Chinese from the Malay Peninsula. He responded that there were too few. Then I suggested he try Indonesia, since Garuda was a relatively seasoned airline. He responded, “Ah, these guys land their planes in the ocean and in jungles and kill all their passengers.” I rounded on him: “Aren’t you being racist?” I noted that a Qantas or British Airways plane piloted by whites had crashed in Singapore’s Kallang Basin Airport. We had a very rough exchange. He had his agenda. When I took the job, I had no agenda whatsoever. I just wanted harmony between Malaysia and Singapore.Meanwhile, the Singapore Government, which was very good with its abacus, was analysing the economics of the airline industry. They began to realise that the Malaysian domestic routes were profitmaking, but looking into the future, they could not see such air travel as big-scale business. The international airport in Singapore, and the international traffic, was really the jewel in the crown of the airline industry in the Malaysia/Singapore region. So the Singapore Government felt it would be useful to break Malaysia-Singapore Airlines into two and let each country go its own way. The Board meetings grew increasingly acrimonious. I made an appointment to see Goh Keng Swee to appeal to him to hold back his aggressive Singapore directors. I hinted that the game was getting very one-sided. I was acting as referee, but I was seeing the poor Malaysian directors slaughtered at every meeting because the Singapore directors had minds as sharp as razors. In fairness, I must say the contribution to running the airline properly and efficiently came almost entirely from the Singapore side. The Malaysian side was too subjective and often allowed their feelings to influence their comments. The writing was on the wall: the airline would separate. Now, I’m sort of a bulldog. When I want to do something, I am very tenacious. But serving as chairman of MSA was a thankless task and I was working like a slave, virtually day and night, in addition to juggling all my other balls.TIME TO RESIGNMoreover, I had been under the impression that this link between the two countries would be preserved. Now that the decision to split was imminent, I decided to pen a resignation letter that they could not refuse. But how do you write two lines of English words which say just that and nothing more? It took me two days to come up with those two lines. Then there was silence for three or four months.The Minister of Finance of Singapore then was Hon Sui Sen, one of the finest men to serve as a cabinet minister from the creation of the island state of Singapore to this day. Born in Penang, he graduated in science from Raffles College about two years before I entered the school. Then came one of the nicest letters I have received in my life. It was penned by Hon Sui Sen himself, and said words to this effect: “I apologise for taking so long to reply. The reason it took so long was we could not find the right successor. This in itself is a compliment to you and what you have done for all of us. Following considerable discussion between the two governments, we have finally come up with a formula of one Chairman from each side to co-chair the board.”They could not have asked for a more classic mongoose and cobra arrangement. The individuals they picked fought each other tooth and nail. When I stepped off, I stepped off completely. I even shut my mind to the whole matter.The Malaysian Government chose Tun Ismail Ali, then Central Bank Governor. The Singapore side picked Joe Pillay, who had been a Singapore director of MSA from the day that I joined the board. In one sense, you could say Joe Pillay gave me the most trouble. In another sense, you could say he was the single most efficient director on the board. I admired his tremendous intellect, an intellect that had no superior in the Singapore/Malaysia region. His grasp of economics and cost accounting was fantastic.I learned from him, watching the way he worked at his job. But he was rather highly strung. Joe is a lovely human being and a gentleman, but when it came to protecting his nation’s interest and discharging his job, he could come out unnecessarily aggressive. I remember one unpleasant exchange between Basil Bampfield, a British Airways-appointed director, and Joe Pillay at a board meeting. Joe told Basil that he should go back to British Airways and Qantas and tell them that some of the existing arrangements were unfair, and that the two airlines should make concessions to MSA. At the next meeting, Basil reported that, on behalf of British Airways and Qantas, he was authorised to agree to every request made at the preceding meeting.I said, “This is amazingly good news. May I on behalf of all of us make a motion to express our thanks to them?” Joe Pillay interrupted, “No! It is ours by right and we should have got it long ago.” I appealed to Joe. Why cry over the past, I thought. Basil Bampfield was a fine English gentleman in an invidious job. He must have gone back and argued MSA’s case forcefully. What the two co-chairmen presided over was like a funeral. To dismantle and separate the whole company was like performing surgery on Siamese twins. It took them a long time to carry out the operation.—Robert Kuok, A MemoirRobert Kuok, perhaps the most astute businessman of his generation within the Peninsula, couldn’t preserve the marriage, despite being arm-twisted into the role by none other than Goh Keng Swee himself.After almost 50 years, when one airline has been run into the ground despite the backing of a national oil producer, we expect the successful ex-spouse who doesn’t see eye to eye to swoop in and save her from drowning?Not gonna happen, even if hell freezes over.Dream on, Mr. Maybank analyst.

Since I am a gun owner, in Texas, and an LTC, I may or may not fit someone’s particular definition of an “average American”. As a gun owner, I’m in a minority threatening to become a superminority, and as a carry permit holder I represent just 5% of the U.S. population. But other than that I own guns, I consider myself toward the middle of that bell curve, so here we go.What do I think about the gun laws in the USA?Kind of a toughie, honestly.First and foremost, “the USA” is a pretty broad scope and a wide gradient of gun laws. Unlike most other advanced-economy countries of the world, where the national government is sufficient to oversee the legal framework of the country, State governments in the United States get a lot of lawmaking and law-enforcement power, due to the structure of the country under the Constitution. Talking about “U.S. Law” is like talking about “EU Law”; the EU members, much like U.S. States, have their own law on most of the topics of interest to the EU as a whole, and the EU’s power to enforce laws is limited by a number of jurisdictional boundaries, beyond which the countries themselves maintain sovereign control. So it is with the U.S. Federal government and the governments of the States; the Constitution splits power between the Feds and the States, by defining specific things the Feds can do and that the States cannot do, and when neither is explicitly specified regarding a power or function of government, it is a State power.While the Feds got some significant expansion of powers in Reconstruction, and again during the Depression and WWII, generally speaking the “dual sovereignty” of the States and the U.S. Federal government means that for a lot of very basic things in “American” society, which State you’re in matters as much as being in the U.S. itself. For a few things, the county and city matter as well.One of those things is guns.One estimate of the individual gun laws in the United States put the number at about 20,000. While that number is subject to intense debate and criticism, I generally think it’s pretty close, specifically because of this multi-layered system of laws and ordinances and the myriad jurisdictions in which they apply. For instance, there are over 16,000 incorporated cities and towns in the U.S.. If even half of them have an ordinance regulating the discharge of a firearm (most do, along the lines of it being a safety hazard and a noise nuisance), you’re nearly halfway there if you consider each version of the ordinance and the jurisdiction in which it applies to be one “law”. Then there are 3000 counties in 50 states (not including DC and other Federal territories like PR, USVI, Guam, AS and other island possessions), plus the State laws, plus the Federal.Anyway, this illustrates the problem with trying to talk about “U.S. gun laws” in a general sense. The laws under which I currently live in the City of Fort Worth, Tarrant County, Texas, USA could be different even from the laws applying to someone in a neighboring bedroom community that is independently incorporated (there’s a reason they call it the Metroplex; besides Dallas and Fort Worth themselves, there are no fewer than 202 independently-incorporated civic entities within the Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington MSA), not to mention those in a neighboring county and definitely a neighboring state. I will say that I know I have it pretty good being a gun owner in Fort Worth, Texas, and not in the Eastern Seaboard such as Maryland, where you’re required to obtain a “permit to purchase” from the police before buying any gun, and the permits to carry are granted on a discretionary basis requiring you to have “more reason than most” to want to carry a gun. But, I could also be a gun owner in Phoenix, where you don’t need a permit to carry at all.In other States, those laws vary even more; California, for instance, leaves a lot of it up to county control. So in Shasta County, in north central California, if you asked a gun owner what he thought of the gun laws, he might say they’re a pain and getting more painful, but he could probably live with them, because this fairly rural county is among the more permissive regarding issue of the necessary permits; the Sheriff will sign the papers almost as a matter of course. I was going to compare that assessment to what the average gun owner in San Francisco County would say, but that might be assuming too much about how many gun owners there are in San Fran County; 880,000 residents in a county of just a few square miles on the northern tip of the southern peninsula sheltering San Francisco Bay, and there are only 2 concealed carry permits. A similar situation exists down in the LA metro; virtually impossible to get a carry permit unless you’re famous enough for the Sheriff to know you personally, but in neighboring Orange County, “self-defense” is a “good reason” to get the permit.Would I change anything?Yes. Hopefully, my position on the number of gun laws in the country is clear by now; I think we could do with a little more standardization. This is very likely a “stick with the devil you know" argument, but I honestly think Texas is a good place to start in terms of laws. The state is no stranger to big-city problems, as we have three of the top 20 most populous metro areas in the country. However, despite Texas being the second most populous state, its murder rate is right at the national average statewide, with many other cities both larger and smaller ranking well above our most violent city (Houston). Cities and states with much tougher laws have much bigger problems despite those laws.So, as a quick primer, Texas has no purchase restrictions other than those imposed by Federal law; you can’t possess a gun without parental supervision under 18, you have to be 21 to buy handguns or handgun ammunition, NFA firearms have to be appropriately registered, purchase is subject to Federal NICS background check. There is a safe storage law; it is a misdemeanor to leave a loaded firearm “accessible to a minor” (not behind lock and key of some sort), and the severity is boosted significantly if that access results in injury or death. This could be stronger, but D.C. v. Heller dealt specifically with a tougher safe storage law (in combination with a handgun ban) so SCOTUS precedent is not kind to laws saying you can’t have a gun ready to use and easily accessible.Public carry is by permit only, whether openly or concealed, and the permit cost recently dropped significantly from $140 to $40 for a first-time applicant (Texas previously had the third-highest such application cost for a “shall issue” permit after Illinois and Arkansas, which was one of the major problems I had with the laws at the time). Without a permit, you can carry a handgun however you like on your own property, while lawfully hunting or while participating in some gun-related event (gun show, at the range, competition etc). Permits allowing more general carry are “shall-issue” with no discretion of the State DPS or local police, good for 5 years, and for a first application (or if it lapses without renewing it) it requires 4 hours classroom education (costs about $60-$80), a 50-round proficiency test at distances out to 15 yards (the toughest such test I’m aware of, modeled after State law enforcement qualification standards), fingerprinting (extra $10) and a clean criminal background check. The permit has a notable perk in that it allows the holder to bypass the NICS check for a firearm purchase, as any situation that would be a prohibiting criteria is also grounds for immediate suspension of the license. If you carry openly you have to use a holster, concealed carry can be in a pocket but some cover for the trigger is always recommended. Carry is prohibited in most government buildings, schools (unless you’re a teacher with district approval), sporting venues, bars/nightclubs and a few other places by statute, with additional prohibitions by private landowners allowed by posting a very specific sign.Not so bad, right? Like I said, there are more permissive states; Arizona and 10 others don’t require a permit to carry at all, openly or concealed, and the proficiency test in Texas is the highest skills-related bar set in any state I’m aware of. But overall, these laws make sense, and they work.There are also much more restrictive states, the most commonly abused policy being “good cause”, requiring the applicant to convince local police or the permitting board they have a good reason to need to carry a handgun. This policy needs to go away; most states that still have it use it as a cover to simply deny all applications that don’t come from someone wealthy or powerful enough to make police and politicians’ lives difficult.National reciprocity (the recognition by one State of another State’s carry permit as being equivalent to its own, subject to the laws of the state the permit holder is currently in, like driver’s licenses) is another thing I think is overdue, as refusal to recognize out of state permits is another common political tactic to make it difficult or impossible for various people to legally carry in the state. About 36 states generally have full reciprocity with each other, with 6 more imposing some requirements that disqualify certain states or permit types, and the remaining 8 do not recognize any permit but their own; they’re the same 8, generally, that make their carry permits as difficult as possible to obtain.At the Federal level, let’s start at the beginning; the NFA is 84 years old, and it shows. There are numerous workarounds to its various restrictions, some of which we need to update the law to include (i.e. bump stocks; I have no personal love for the device, and while you can do the same thing with a belt loop there’s little reason to make it any easier), and others that people who know guns look at and say, “WTF” (i.e. short-barreled rifles; you can get ARs that have an “arm brace” instead of a shoulder stock and therefore qualify as pistols, but this brace is just as easy to use as a stock). Suppressors are an NFA-regulated item, though over in the gun-control haven of the UK, hunters are encouraged to get one, to the point that you can buy them off the shelf from any hunting store for pennies on the dollar compared to their cost Stateside. I’m in favor of trading a ban or Title II restriction of bump stocks for deregulation of SBRs, SBSes and suppressors.The Fix NICS Act, passed in March, was a good move; it requires all State and Federal agencies to ensure their NICS reporting is complete, accurate and up-to-date, with Federal assistance in getting there, additional oversight to ensure it happens and penalties for not doing so. I’m generally in favor of the program as implemented; the biggest remaining problem is the ability of the ATF to manage a threefold increase in the volume of paperwork they have to audit. By law, the ATF is required to audit every FFL annually; in 2015, they managed just 7% of them. NFA paperwork for Title II devices is backlogged 8 months; hunters wishing to bring their suppressor across state lines have to file their application this deer season in order to be ready for next deer season (more realistically, they either bring it along or they don’t, and the ATF is none the wiser either way). This obviously isn’t working. Either have the ATF and fund it adequately for enough manpower to get the job done, or get rid of it and save the taxpayer $1.2 billion annually (the NICS budget for background checks is an FBI line item; $1.2 bn is what it costs to police gun manufacturers, importers and retailers to make sure all their paperwork is in order).