KUALA LUMPUR: Perak ruler, Sultan Nazrin Muizzuddin Shah today launched a book to commemorate 30 years of Security Commission Malaysia's journey to global acclaim.
Sultan Nazrin said the book, Capital Market in Malaysia: Past, Present and Future, really pays tribute to the power of the team who have come together across the decades to build the SC into an internationally celebrated regulatory body.
"What I particularly enjoyed about the way this book delivers its contributors' stories is that there is also space for those truly human moments.
Sultan Nazrin said the book gave a real and important insight into the lives touched by global events – and how the 'personal and economic intersect'.
"How typical, for instance, that the Asian Financial Crisis should begin in earnest just as Tan Sri Ranjit Singh (another Chairman of the SC) set off on his honeymoon! And how wonderfully down-to-earth that, in the midst of the Covid pandemic, Chairman Datuk Syed Zaid Albar decided staff could swap suits for jeans and sneakers, to make everyone feel as comfortable as possible in an unprecedentedly stressful time.
"While these and other such anecdotes might be taken as somewhat frivolous details, there to add colour, I believe they are more than this.
"They are a reminder of the real lives, the real sacrifices, the real relationships and camaraderie upon which the SC has been built," the Sultan said, adding that he believed that strengthening institutions goes hand in hand with empowering their people," he said.
The books also highlight SC's foresight, he said, showing how SC staff succesfully advised caution at the national and international level just before a crisis struck.
"Tan Sri Munir Majid saw the warning signs of the market "super boom" ahead of the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997. The SC's own report on the causes and effects of this financial crisis called for regulation
of international hedge funds around a decade before the Global Financial Crisis in 2007, and although the advice was not necessarily acted upon, it rightly earned the SC global credibility and influence in retrospect," he added.
The Capital Market in Malaysia: Past, Present and Future book is written by Jennifer Jacobs.
