Of ASEAN Domination, Meritocracy and the Razak Name

CIMB Group CEO Dato Sri Nazir Razak starts off by offering an outlook for its financial performance for the rest of 2010, and which divisions are seeing the biggest gains.
He then talks about how the CIMB of the future will be an entity that reflects its increasingly ASEAN earnings complexion and what he means by that operationally as well as from the standpoint of its ownership structure and its regionalisation efforts.

He touches also on the country's GLC selldown plan and whether there might there be an acceleration in the selldown of CIMB's shares, given that they are at near-record highs.
He then talks about CIMB's main presence right now in 4 countries - Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia - and the prospect that China and India might figure more prominently down the road.

He also discusses speculative inflows, in addition to the challenges of rapid platform and geographical expansion and touches also on the delay of its Thai IPO.

In the second part of the interview, he discusses ETP, private sector investment, Malaysia's biggest challenges and the best way to address them.
He touches on corruption and leakages, the lack of free float in Malaysian capital markets, the PLUS sale to UEM - EPF, and his role on EPF's Investment Committee.

Lastly, he discusses his decision to head to Oxford, for a stint in Islamic studies, speculation of a move in future, into politics, his views on NEP and its practice, afirmative action and the meritocracy agenda.

He also addresses this issue: of being the youngest son of Malaysia's second prime minister and the brother of the present Prime Minister -- and how much of a boon -- and a bane -- have these connections been.