The stock market fortunes of the previously failing Sarawak Cable Bhd have leapt over the past month following an announcement by the company that a so-called ‘White Knight’ investor has offered to inject no less than a quarter of a billion ringgit towards “resuscitating” the enterprise which was over RM388 million in debt.
The news of the proposed bail out has sent share prices soaring from a dismal 0.05 sen per share at the start of the month to 4o sen and well over in the course of the past week.
Given the controversial history of this Taib family controlled company Sarawak Report researched the UK based so-called ‘White Knight’ and identified a British citizen named Rafat Ali Rizvi as the sole shareholder of that company, which was set up in September with a share capital of £100.
In our item published December 16th (see below) we pointed out that Mr Rizvi has had a somewhat turbulent career in the field of finance having been prosecuted by the Indonesian authorities over the government bail out of Bank Century during the financial crisis in 2008.
A Red Notice was issued through INTERPOL which he successfully fought through a legal action claiming the charges were politically motivated.
There are no other officers of Serendib Capital Ltd (UK) and no stated assets. Its registered premises are a serviced offices facility in Mayfair.
UK company records further show that since 2017 Mr Rizvi has both incorporated and dissolved five other companies in the UK with share capital under £100 each, four of which he was the sole director, describing himself in the capacity of entrepreneur, consultant or director.
Our article on the other hand acknowledged that with his history of finance Mr Rizvi “is clearly in the business of being able to mobilise considerable capital”.
Imagine our surprise, therefore, when within a couple of days Sarawak Report received a threatening letter from lawyers claiming to represent the said Serendib Capital Limited in the UK.
Allegedly, we had looked up the wrong company entirely and were mistaken in our remarks. Quote:
“We take note of the contents of your article and would like to notify you that the facts that you have stated about our client are in fact inaccurate as presumably you have visited the wrong website or searched the wrong company as the word Serendib is a common word as it refers to an old name for Sri Lanka.We suggest you either withdraw your article with regards to our client and make an apology for referring to our client, who is in fact not the same entity referred to in your article……”
Sarawak Report therefore suspended the article and enquired of the lawyers which the correct company (namely their client) might be, since the Sarawak Cable stock market announcement had made clear their ‘White Knight’ was a UK based company called Serendib Capital Limited? (There cannot be two companies with the same name in the same jurisdiction).
Eventually, we received a reply to say that the website for the correct company was https://www.serendib.capital/about/. The same email conceded that in fact Mr Rizvi “is involved with the company” but complained that “the facts on the company, as stated prior, is inaccurate”[sic].
We hurried to understand our mistake….. only to discover that the company referred to in this website gives the exact same serviced offices address at 8-10 Hill Street in London and whilst it claims to have a twenty year history of arranging finance in Sri Lanka the website was again set up in 2023.
Moreover, the website refers to “a seasoned team of principles” yet names no directors or staff members beyond two ‘Advisory Board Members’. One of these, the Japanese Dr Takeo Hirata, has just been appointed to the board of Sarawak Cable Bhd in an apparent acceptance of the ‘White Knight’ proposal. (Mr Hirata has had his own brush with unfavourable headlines, having resigned from his country’s Olympics secretariat under something of a cloud).
Sarawak Report, therefore, simply cannot fathom how we could be accused of identifying the wrong company or the wrong people in this case. Particularly, since the lawyers added the information that the Sri Lankan business is now a “wholly owned subsidiary” of the £100 pound UK company “used as the vehicle in the Sarawak Cable Bhd exercise” (as the lawyers put it).
It is Mr Rafat Ali Rizvi who is registered as the person of significant control over this enterprise, owning all of the shares in the UK holding company.
So, what was “inaccurate” thereby warranting a removal of the article and an apology?
After further questioning and concessions by the lawyers it appears the point at issue is a claim that Sarawak Report had identified the recently incorporated UK company vehicle and the correct person in control of it, but had failed to mention the claimed history of deals by a subsidiary in Sri Lanka that are referred to in the website.
The website barely mentions these deals either – they comprise a claimed restructuring of the country’s Union Bank and also of Lanka Bangla Finance, an outfit in Bangladesh ( during the period from 2003).
Sarawak Report could find no further references to these engagements elsewhere online and struggles to understand why it is “inaccurate” to have failed to mention them in an article about Sarawak Cable in 2023.
We have now put these and other questions to Mr Rizvi, since the KL based lawyers who originally challenged us over claims we had written about the “wrong company” now say they cannot answer further as they only represent Serendib Capital Ltd and not the sole shareholder and director of the company, Mr Rizvi.
They have referred us to Mr Rizvi from whom we await a reply.
We note that the present activities of Serendib Capital Ltd are entirely focused on ‘Blue Carbon’ projects (chasing carbon capture credits from the oceans). There are sparse details provided for any of the five projects cited, four of which are described as being “in development” with only one “in progress” involving mangrove conservation off the coast of Africa.
What this has to do with the manufacture and installation of power cables is in the eye of the beholder. It is surely not inaccurate not to cite it?
Meanwhile, Sarawak Report has learned that other media who also sought to detail some background on Serendib Capital Limited have received similar veiled and confusing threats.
Having rectified the ‘failure’ to mention the history of achievements in Sri Lanka of the wholly owned subsidiary of the brand new company, we are therefore reposting our original article (below).
Given the feeding frenzy that seems to have broken out for the formerly worthless shares in Sarawak Cable it would seem that Malaysian investors deserve far more information and detail on this ‘White Knight’ partnership as opposed to the removal of the few articles that have examined the matter in a little more depth.
[Please find the original story below]
[Update – following this article Mr Rifat Ali Rizvi has announced he is joining the board of Sarawak Cable, confirming we were not talking about the wrong company after all. https://www.bursamalaysia.com/market_information/announcements/company_announcement/announcement_details?ann_id=3411573 ]
Sarawak Cable And Its New ‘White Knight’ [16.December.2023]
Sarawak’s business community have been somewhat mystified by the announcement of a new ‘White Knight’ to bail out the Taib family controlled Sarawak Cable formed to secure the lucrative contract to manufacture and install cables from the Bakun dam to the local grid and beyond into Kalimantan over in Indonesia.
Apparently the offspring of the so-called CEO of Sarawak, former chief minister Abdul Taib Mahmud, have failed to manage this monopoly as successfully one might have expected.
However, the name of the RM250m takeover bidder, announced by The Edge last week, rang no bells in the industry. Perhaps this is no surprise since Serendib Capital Ltd, which the paper described as undertaking a “resuscitation exercise to revive the loss-making manufacturer” is described as based in the UK.
However, a swift review of Serendib Capital has so far provided more questions than answers about the rescue bid. Company enquiries reveal the company was incorporated just last September, by just one man for just one hundred pounds (RM600).
It has to be said, the man in question is a banker of some renown and is clearly in the business of being able to mobilise considerable capital should this be the immediate fix the company in Sarawak is needy of.
He is one Rafat Ali Rizvi who clearly has a history of high rolling deals, although not all of them have gone as smoothly as he might have liked.
Most notably, he and his partners fell out big time with the authorities over the border in Indonesia in 2008 following the bailout of Bank Century (now bank Mutiara) during the global financial crisis.
That country executed an INTERPOL Red Notice for the British national’s arrest and extradition having laid criminal charges against him and alleged co-conspirators.
According to a summary of the case by the UN drugs and crime agency UNODC, the defendants “were alleged to have illegally caused the collapse in order to enrich themselves and certain third persons”.
Thankfully for Mr Rafat Ali Rizvi, following the high profile intervention of a hard hitting law firm Gherson LLP these charges were found to have been politically motivated and unjust.
In a rare move INTERPOL was prevailed upon not only to reject the Red Notice against Mr Ali Rizvi but to publish its own notice exonerating him and a banking colleague.
Clearly this incident has not frightened the banker away from taking up further business in South East Asia and doing so in a personal capacity. This is a sizeable commitment for a one man company which has so far not recorded any further injection of assets that would explain the massive investment promised in its name.
However, Sarawak Report is not privy to all the intricacies of high finance and has not so far traced this global financier to ask further questions.
Doubtless he and his Taib family partners in Sarawak have a plan to mobilise investors and the necessary expertise to re-invigorate the company in its sector and have explained all to the relevant regulatory bodies.
Doubtless they soon will also do so to interested Sarawakians. However, the folly and arrogance of a family who attempted so long to run the state as a quasi family business has been exposed once again for the greedy sham it always was.
More than a decade after the Bakun Dam became operational, native communities up and down the state and in the surrounding area remain unconnected to the grid. That was the purported reason for building this destructive white elephant of a mega-project that lined the pockets of the rich and powerful.
It was Sarawak Cable that was supposed to provide the transmission lines that have so far failed to fulfil that promise.
Sarawak’s business community have been somewhat mystified by the announcement of a new ‘White Knight’ to bail out the Taib family controlled Sarawak Cable formed to secure the lucrative contract to manufacture cables from the Bakun dam to the local grid and Kalimantan over in Indonesia.
Apparently the offspring of the so-called CEO of Sarawak, former chief minister Abdul Taib Mahmud, have failed to manage this monopoly as successfully as one might have hoped.
However, the name of the RM250m takeover bidder, announced by The Edge last week, rang no bells in the industry. Perhaps this is no surprise since Serendib Capital Ltd, which the paper described as undertaking a “resuscitation exercise to revive the loss-making manufacturer” is described as based in the UK.
However, a swift review of Serendib Capital has so far provided more questions than answers about the rescue bid. Company enquiries reveal the company was incorporated just last September, by just one man for just one hundred pounds (RM600).
It has to be said, the man in question is a banker of some renown and is clearly in the business of being able to mobilise considerable capital should this be the immediate fix the company in Sarawak is needy of.
He is one Rafat Ali Rizvi who clearly has a history of high rolling deals, although not all of them have gone as smoothly as he might have liked.
Most notably, he and his partners fell out big time with the authorities over the border in Indonesia in 2008 following the bailout of Bank Century (now bank Mutiara) during the global financial crisis.
That country executed an INTERPOL Red Notice for the British national’s arrest and extradition having laid criminal charges against him and alleged co-conspirators.
According to a summary of the case by the UN drugs and crime agency UNODC, the defendants “were alleged to have illegally caused the collapse in order to enrich themselves and certain third persons”.
Thankfully for Mr Rafat Ali Rizvi, following the high profile intervention of a hard hitting law firm Gherson LLP these charges were found to have been politically motivated and unjust.
In a rare move INTERPOL was prevailed upon not only to reject the Red Notice against Mr Ali Rizvi but to publish its own notice exonerating him and a banking colleague.
Clearly this incident has not frightened the banker away from taking up further business in South East Asia and doing so in a personal capacity. This is a sizeable commitment for a one man company which has so far not recorded any further injection of assets that would explain the massive investment promised in its name.
However, Sarawak Report is not privy to all the intricacies of high finance and has not so far traced this global financier to ask further questions.
Doubtless he and his Taib family partners in Sarawak have a plan to mobilise investors and the necessary expertise to re-invigorate the company in its sector and have explained all to the relevant regulatory bodies.
Doubtless they soon will also do so to interested Sarawakians. However, the folly and arrogance of a family who attempted so long to run the state as a quasi family business has been exposed once again for the greedy sham it always was.
After all, more than a decade after the Bakun Dam became operational, native communities up and down the state and in the surrounding area remain unconnected to
the grid. That was the purported reason for building this destructive white elephant of a mega-project that lined the pockets of the rich and powerful.
It was Sarawak Cable that was supposed to provide the transmission lines that have so far failed to fulfil that promise.