KUALA LUMPUR, June 1 ― Opposition lawmaker Ong Kian Ming slammed Bank Negara Malaysia’s (BNM) decision to enter into a 10-year business collaboration with Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management to establish the Asia School of Business (ASB) here.
The Serdang MP said there were no provisions in the Central Bank Act of Malaysia that allowed BNM to get into a business with the American insitute.
“While it is laudable that Bank Negara has the vision to turn the Asia School of Business into a ‘premier business school’, the business of education is not and should not be the business of the central bank.
“Nowhere in the Act does it say that Bank Negara should get involved in the business of education especially when it has no direct implications on the financial and banking sector in the country,” he said.
The decision was announced in April and ASB would offer both degree and non-degree programmes with the first Master of Business Administration programme scheduled to be launched in September next year while non-degree executive education programmes in September this year.
A permanent ASB campus would be built on an approximately eight-hectare piece of prime land in the cusp of Kuala Lumpur’s business district and while the architectural plans are under way, ASB would be located in Sasana Kijang, BNM’s centre of excellence in knowledge and learning.
Quoting several provisions in the Central Bank Act of Malaysia 2009, Ong said that the bank’s objectives did not cover the establishment of a business school which had no direct implications on the country’s financial and banking standing.
He said while the bank has the right to establish a corporate body for training, research and development of human resources and financial management consulting, they had already met the needs for this in the International Center for Education in Islamic Finance (INCEIF) and the Credit Counselling and Debt Management agency.
“Even in the area of developing leaders and inculcating leadership skills, Bank Negara has already established the ICLIF Leadership and Governance Center. With the establishment of all these institutes and agencies, why is there the need to set up yet another entity, the Asian School of Business, which seems to have little direct relationship to the banking and financial services sector?”, he asked in a statement here today.
Ong said such previous endeavours had been less than successful, pointing out the Malaysian University of Science and Technology and Perdana University which had similar collaborations but had to rely on government scholarships for enrollment.
Both fell through after facing financial difficulties in funding the collaboration.
“Bank Negara will most definitely face similar challenges in having to stump up generous scholarships in order to attract the initial batch of students and this could create a vicious cycle which will be unsustainable,” said Ong.
He said that the Asia School of Business would be an expensive endeavour especially considering the salaries of high profile and highly qualified foreign academics who will make up the faculty at the school in Kuala Lumpur.
“The fact that Bank Negara has deep pockets should be even more worrying since this means that more money can be spent on this endeavour over the course of the 10-year collaboration.
“I call upon Bank Negara to cease this collaboration immediately rather than to invest millions of ringgit of its reserves in an area which it has no business being part of in the first place,” he said.
