00:00The price of oil remains in fluxes.
00:01Plenty of fighting across the Middle East today.
00:04Cluster warheads causing extensive damage.
00:07The aerial battle between both sides has intensified.
00:10The timing could not be worse.
00:14As the Iran war disrupts global oil supply and drives up prices,
00:19countries need stable energy systems.
00:21Yet Malaysia now faces a dispute over its petroleum laws,
00:24raising uncertainty when stability matters most.
00:28Against this backdrop, emotions are high.
00:31Some East Malaysian leaders are voicing frustrations over oil and gas revenue
00:35with talk of leaving the Federation.
00:39Secession talk is a symptom,
00:42but perhaps perbualan ke keluar Malaysia ini mungkin bukan satu ancaman,
00:48tetapi mungkin ialah symptom, mungkin ada defisit kepercayaan di sana.
00:51Kalau betul-betul pihak kerajaan persekutuan tidak mau tunaikan 40%,
00:59tidak mau bagi kurusi wajar untuk Sabah,
01:03setakat sekarang pun tidak pernah memberitahu kawangan yang sebenar,
01:07berapa yang hasil diterima daripada Sabah dan Sarawak,
01:11kita masing-masing sejalan.
01:13Looking at what's happening here in the mainland,
01:16maybe we were never meant to be one nation in the first place.
01:19That's why God separated us by the South China Sea.
01:21You don't like us, just divorce us.
01:24These are not straight comments.
01:26They show how far the Petronas-Sarawak dispute has spread beyond oil and gas.
01:31What started as a dispute over gas aggregation and regulatory overlap
01:35is now a constitutional fight.
01:38Sarawak has asked the federal court to examine the validity and applicability
01:42of three federal petroleum laws,
01:44including the Petroleum Development Act of 1974.
01:49Petronas first went to court to seek clarity
01:51on which legal framework governs its operations in Sarawak.
01:54Sarawak then went further by challenging the PDA itself.
01:58That changes the dispute.
02:00It is no longer just about Petronas and Petros working out an arrangement,
02:04but about who ultimately controls petroleum resources off Sarawak's coast.
02:09Sarawak frames this as a rights issue,
02:11but also as a development issue.
02:14Its argument is that petroleum resources within its boundaries
02:17should be treated as part of Sarawak's entitlement
02:20under the Malaysia Agreement in 1963
02:22and the constitutional arrangement behind the formation of Malaysia.
02:27From that follows a broader demand.
02:28Greater control over gas supply,
02:31a larger role for Petros,
02:33and a bigger share of the value generated offshore.
02:36Its leaders have also been careful to say that this is not about destroying Petronas.
02:41Petronas shouldn't be too worried because we're not going to hurt Petronas
02:46purposely to say that why should we want to kill off Petronas.
02:51That matters.
02:53Sarawak is not presenting this simply as an attack on a national company.
02:57It is presenting it as a push for a different balance of power and benefit.
03:02The PDA is not a technical side issue.
03:04It is the foundation of Malaysia's petroleum system.
03:07By investing petroleum resources in Petronas,
03:10it created a single national oil company with consolidated authority.
03:14Economist Golan Tai says that model gave Malaysia scale
03:18and a capital-intensive global industry.
03:21And scale matters.
03:23He adds that the oil and gas industry requires huge upfront investment.
03:28Offshore platforms, pipelines, liquefied natural gas facilities, export infrastructure.
03:34In that kind of business, size can lower costs,
03:37strengthen financing, and improve bargaining power.
03:41Malaysia is not a giant producer.
03:44For a country of its size,
03:45coordination can be the difference between staying competitive and being squeezed.
03:50That is also how former Finance Minister Tengku Razali Hamza
03:55still explains the logic behind Petronas.
03:57His argument is that oil control had to be moved away from foreign hands
04:02and put under a national structure strong enough
04:04to generate more value for the country as a whole.
04:22So his point is not that Sabah and Sarawak should accept less.
04:26It is that Malaysia needed a structure big enough to grow the pie.
04:30That is the scale argument in its simplest form.
04:33Malaysia needed enough weight and credibility
04:36to deal with a business dominated by much larger players.
04:40This is why so many politicians over the years
04:43across party lines have rallied behind Petronas.
04:47Their argument is not that Sarawak has no grievances.
04:50It is that weakening Petronas could weaken the whole system.
04:55Petronas is the goose that laid the golden eggs.
04:59If you were to break up, you know, the goose that laid the golden eggs
05:03to several parts, we lost the economic scale.
05:06A goose that produced a golden egg
05:10should be kept for the future of other people in this country.
05:14To destroy Petronas, I think it's a bad move
05:20because this is one company that Malaysians are proud of.
05:27It's a great company.
05:52This is why some lawmakers see Sarawak's latest move as an escalation.
05:57Their issue is not with seeking clarity in court.
06:00It is with going after the PDA itself
06:02because that opens a much larger question
06:05about the structure of the industry.
06:07So, when the PDA was introduced,
06:09it was to create an economy of scale
06:13from the scale, workforce, technical resources, and so on.
06:21That is the concern.
06:23Once the fight moves from arrangements to foundations,
06:26the consequences may extend far beyond Sarawak and Petronas.
06:30Even many of those defending Petronas
06:32are not seeing Sarawak should be ignored.
06:34Their point is that legal clarity
06:36should not replace negotiation.
06:38It does not mean Petronas
06:40who brought this issue to court
06:43to identify suspect the mandate.
06:46And it does not explain what Sarawak's issue is to make
06:49to direct suspect the mandate.
06:52For my opinion, this is the platform
06:54to see what the mandate is,
06:56what the mandate is to understand
06:58the mandate itself
06:58so that it doesn't feel he was disappointed
07:02what the mandate is.
07:16And even Sarawak's own leaders have acknowledged that this cannot be resolved through confrontation alone.
07:21The gas industry, we work together with Petronas. After all, we need Petronas.
07:27We don't want Petronas or Petros to be involved in this issue for a long time.
07:34Because this will reduce the confidence of the public to Petronas itself.
07:39The court can answer illegal questions, but it cannot, on its own, resolve the larger tension between Sarawak's demand for
07:47greater control
07:48and Malaysia's need to preserve a viable national energy system.
07:52So the issue is not whether Sarawak has claims worth hearing. It does.
07:57The issue is whether those claims can be accommodated without weakening the structure that may Petronas a national institution in
08:04the first place.
08:05That is what makes this dispute so consequential.
08:08It is about rights. It is about scale.
08:11And it is about whether Malaysia can hold both together.
08:16It is important here that I would like to conclude is that Malaysia is designed to be able to develop
08:24together.
08:26Dona Sharajir Reza, FMT.
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