Today’s headline in the newspaper is rather appalling.Our young citizens have been encouraged not to pay study loans amounting to RM12billion since 1997.
Just imagine that! For the past 10 years they gave out loans totalling RM12 billion and have only managed to collect back RM350million or a mere 2.9%
of the loans provided.
Now if you operate a business with such a record, you will be bankrupt within six months but since Malaysia is busy extracting all our oil reserves post haste RM12billion over 10 years is just peanuts.
The terms of the loan repayments are also very generous and the collection process seems to have been decided by jellyfish who are spineless to lay down strict conditions to enforce collection.
Giving 5 to 30 years is definitely too long and the money repaid is worthless after 30 years. So the repayment period should be cut to the maximum of 10 years.
The 75% rebate is also too generous. This should be restricted to those who obtain First Class Honours only in critical fields and returning to serve the nation after graduation.
It appears that the PSD has no clue on how to recover loans except to “station officers in Britain, the United States, Japan, France, Germany and Australia, where the majority of its students are located.”
It seems to be such a nice posting but with minimal success when “the number of Malaysian scholars who remain abroad has dropped from 117,297 in 2000 to 56,609 in 2005.”
The recent steps to finally tackle defaulters is really “too little, too late” and akin to just giving a little slap to the hand that has stolen thousands.
I think the following plan will yield much better results:
*Sell all the loans to the banks at a discount such as a 25% or RM9billion
*All those who refuse to return will not be allowed to renew their passports overseas but have to return to Malaysia and not allowed to travel unless they make arrangements for loan settlement.
*If they give up Malaysian citizenship we should sue them in their adopted country.
*I would also enact laws so that the estate of loan defaulters will be charged with the loan amount plus the accrued interest at market rates for the period after graduation.
With a comprehensive loan recovery scheme, the government can recall back the scores of PSD officers stationed abroad as borrowers will soon develop greater responsibility.
photo: Thanks to http://g.1asphost.com/mybank4u/ringgit.jpg
2 comments:
Happy Easter to you HJ! Hope you have a meaningful day with your loved ones :-)
When you owe you must pay, but before you owe they must ensure that the money owed must returned within a specific period.
However obviously proper steps had not been taken right from the start. To me these incidents are not so straight forward as negligence but a web of deceit by intentionally messing up everything so that there are no proper records as found in an email by a MARA student.
Money has been channeled somewhere by making use of some students name. I am not saying that they are doing this to every student but maybe 20-25% of them which means about RM300 million has gone astray for the 10-12 years and works out to be about RM25,000,000 a year. Obviously there will be some who actually got their loan and refused to pay back. However if you put 2 and 2 together I think there is a dead rat somewhere. They will definitely dare not go all out to recover the loan because by doing that they will be letting the cat out of the bag. So that is way we can see they are dragging their feet and there are some hare brained MPs who disagree that they should be banned from leaving the country because they want their votes. They are not only selfish but stupid because they will loose more votes for failing to address this malady which will affect the future generation which obviously some MPs do not care.
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