PETALING JAYA, July 24 ― State oil firm Petronas is expanding its search for a chief risk officer to Singapore, placing a half-page advertisement in a newspaper there to announce the vacancy for “a very senior position”.
“The CRO will provide oversight and direction for the management of all risks across the Petronas Group,” said the advertisement published during the weekend, adding that the successful hire would report to the senior management “to ensure that the strategic vision of the organisation is developed with the consideration of the risks involved”.
The cross-border foray drew the curious interest of industry veterans in the island state, with some seeing it as validation of the maturity of the risk management industry there, according to the Business Times.
One veteran noted, however, Petronas may have set its sights on hiring for “a very senior position” in Singapore for another reason.
“Singapore is a good hunting ground for Petronas, given the many Malaysians working in the risk management area here,” the business paper quoted the unnamed commentator as saying.
Another industry veteran told the Business Times that a likely reason for Petronas extending its CRO search to Singapore was because “there are more people involved in risk management here than back home”.
But Petronas’s Singapore hunt may also be indicative of the Malaysia’s brain drain problem, which has led the government to form the Talent Corp agency in a bid to stem the outflow of human capital.
With an estimated five per cent of the population quitting the country annually, Malaysia has long suffered a brain drain that is often attributed to racially-biased affirmative action policies, with Singapore the main beneficiary.
According to a World Bank report in 2011, the quantity of skilled Malaysians living abroad rose 300 per cent in the last two decades, with two out of every 10 Malaysians with tertiary education opting to leave for either OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries or Singapore.
The organisation also highlighted a geographic and ethnic component to the talent outflow, with about 88 per cent of the Malaysian diaspora in Singapore being of ethnic Chinese origin.
Former Petronas chief executive Tan Sri Hassan Marican was also a high-profile Malaysian feather in Singapore’s cap, after he was named chairman of Singapore Power Limited (SP) in June last year.
In Parliament last week, Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department Datuk Seri Abdul Wahid Omar said that Talent Corp, charged with enticing Malaysian workers back to the country, has spent a total of RM65 million for its efforts.
He added that the agency’s Returning Expert Programme (REP) had brought back 680 experts in 2011, 923 in 2012 and 502 from January to June this year, the majority of whom were Chinese Malaysian men.
“Generally, it’s money well-spent,” Abdul Wahid told Parliament then.
This led critics to home in on the seeming average of RM30,879 for each returning worker, questioning the value of such outlay.
Talent Corp later issued a statement that the RM65 million sum covered the entirety of its programmes that it said extended to both Malaysians here and abroad, and insisted the amount should not be apportioned solely across its REP numbers.
