Nasarudin Abdul Rahman

The TPP and Government Procurement in Malaysia

Government procurement (GP) is one of the most controversial areas in TPP, particularly for Malaysia where government procurement activities contribute significantly to the development and growth of businesses and the economy a whole. This paper seeks to investigate the impact of the TPP on Malaysian government procurement rules. While efficiency, competition, and effectiveness will be the rule of the game, the GP Chapter of the TPP can make the Malaysian legal framework regulating GP more predictable, accessible and transparent, giving value for money to consumers and taxpayers. This paper, however, will explore the challenges to procuring entities who have to comply with higher international standards when awarding contracts and to the recipients of those contracts among local companies including Bumiputera companies as they have to brace for an open GP market post-TPP. There are flexibilities offered by the GP Chapter, but there will be an issue whether those flexibilities could help balance between the positive and negative effects of the Chapter on Malaysia.

Regulating competition in the Malaysian telecommunication sector: a need for a new approach?

The objective of a competition law is to protect the process of competition between firms in the market by preventing any anti-competitive behaviour such as cartel, abuse of dominant position and mergers that have the effect of lessening competition. However, it is often argued that network industries such as telecommunication should be excluded from the application of the generic competition law, as it has particular characteristic such as natural monopoly, the existence of high entry barriers and absence of effective competition in the market which requires continuous monitoring of the market in the form of access regulation and price control. This paper aims to analyse the existing regulatory and institutional framework overseeing competition in the Malaysian telecommunications sector. The main focus of this paper is to analyse the manner in which competition is pursued through specific sector regulation and whether specific rules on competition are effectively and rigorously enforced. This paper then explains the benefits that will arise from the application of the generic competition law to the telecommunication sector and from increasing the role of the competition authority to regulate the same.

'Shari'ah corporation': the legal entity of corporation from the Malaysian law and shari'ah perspective

Under the Malaysian law which is based on the English law, companies are recognised as a legal person and the metaphor of corporate personality is used to justify the company’s legal framework. As a creature of the statute, companies’ totally depend on the Companies Act. On the other hand, under Shari’ah, the existence of business entity is based upon agreement between the parties and the legal basis of Shari’ah business structure is the contractual principles. With the recent rapid development in Shari’ah compliance businesses in Malaysia, such as Islamic finance and halal products, there is a question on whether Shari’ah businesses could be carried out in a civil law business structure. This paper analyse companies’ legal framework under the Malaysian law and compare them with the principles of Shari’ah. The outcome of this paper is a proposal for a legal framework of an Islamic corporation.