☕️ TNB's bad debts: RM1 bil, 600,000 accounts

1. MARKET SUMMARY 📈

2. NUMBERS AT A GLANCE 🔢

RM64 bil in economic losses were caused by non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in 2021, according to Health Minister Datuk Seri Dr Dzulkefly Ahmad. This figure reflects the impact of the four most common NCDs—cardiovascular diseases, cancer, diabetes, and chronic respiratory illnesses. Of this total, RM12.4 bil was spent directly on healthcare for NCD patients, while RM51.8 bil accounted for indirect costs, such as loss of productivity from those unable to work.

10 mil units is the milestone that China’s new energy vehicle (NEV) production has surpassed this year, making it the first country in the world to reach this level. This marks a significant leap from 18,000 units in 2013, the first year NEV production and sales were officially tracked. Last year, China’s annual NEV production totalled 9.59 mil units. Some countries have introduced unfair trade policies (against China) to protect local enterprises, disrupting regular international trade, while China’s domestic automobile market has also faced disorderly competition.

3. IN MALAYSIA 🇲🇾

600,000 accounts that owe TNB RM1 bil get cut off
TNB is now owed more than RM1 bil from 600,000 accounts (an average of RM1.67k outstanding per account), all of which have been disconnected as of Oct, as mentioned by Deputy Minister of Energy Transition and Water Transformation Akram Nasrullah during an oral Q&A session in Parliament. This shows a worrying increase, as there were only about 460,000 suspended accounts last year, with the top five states with the most arrears being Selangor, KL, Perak, Johor, and Terengganu. 
Akram also reminded that TNB has the rights to disconnect electricity supply after a seven-day notice to customers who are 30 days late to payments. TNB usually adopts a more lenient approach to avoid shutting the lights, but is now taking a firmer stand against non-domestic consumers, i.e businesses.

Hong Kong-based buyout firm splurges RM7.4 bil on two SEA companies
Affinity Equity Partners has acquired two Southeast Asian companies, homegrown Golden Fresh and Jakarta-based Yupi, for RM2 bil and RM5.3 bil respectively. The latter, one of Asia’s largest gummy candy makers, was acquired from one of Yupi’s founders. The sellers for Penang-based Golden Fresh, on the other hand, remain unknown for now. 
Golden Fresh is one of Malaysia’s biggest seafood processing company previously under Butterworth Iceworks Sdn Bhd that also owns the Pacific West brand.

Teenager rescued from kidnappers in Shah Alam
A 15-year-old girl was rescued from her kidnappers after police arrested seven individuals, including two women. The girl's father filed a police report on Nov 18 after receiving a concerning voice message indicating that she had been in an argument with a man, besides instructing him to pick her up at a location in Subang. When he arrived, she was not there, and he subsequently received a Whatsapp message stating she had been released somewhere in Kuala Lumpur.

Police tracked down the kidnappers to an apartment in i-City, where they found the teenager unharmed, and arrested three males and two females aged between 15 and 19 (young criminal masterminds in the making we got here). A subsequent raid near Mid Valley Megamall led to the arrest of two additional males, aged 16 and 18. None of the suspects had prior criminal records, and all have been remanded to assist with ongoing investigations.

Malaysian political drama

PAS and Bersatu alliance on borrowed time
The two parties are breaking up soon due to internal issues, according to Pakatan Harapan communications director Fahmi Fadzil. Fahmi described the relationship of the PAS-Bersatu duo as strenuous due to a current dispute as to who should be the opposition’s PM candidate. To highlight this, Fahmi mentioned the dismissal of Bersatu representatives post the Perlis Cabinet reshuffle, as well as the absence of Bersatu top leadership at a major event in Terengganu. 

There were also reports that Bersatu VP Faizal Amumu proposed PM8 Muhyiddin Yassin to reclaim his hot seat as PM- though, PAS spiritual leader, Hashim Jasin, maintains that PAS is more qualified to lead the coalition as they rejected the proposal.

Return of Pasir Salak
After four separate appeals to have his suspension revoked, Tajuddin Abdul Rahman is back in UMNO’s ranks with immediate effect, as announced in a statement after a Supreme Council meeting on Monday. In 2022, Tajuddin was removed from his post as a Supreme Council member, and was subsequently handed a six-year suspension following his vocal criticism of UMNO and its president, Zahid Hamidi, before the General Election that year. Tajuddin wasn’t alone in getting booted though, former UMNO VP Hishammuddin Hussein and former information chief Shahril Hamdan were ousted from the party too.

The Pasir Salak MP infamous for the “train kissing” quote addressing two LRTs colliding is now back on track. We previously did a collection of his controversies below:

Shorts

1. Bitcoin for.. alimony?

   A wife looking for Bitcoin payments from ex-husband has her case in the Syariah court dismissed. The plaintiff was demanding 200 BTC, then valued at around RM10 mil- it amounts to an eyewatering RM81 mil or so now, following Donald Trump becoming US president-elect and his strong stance in crypto. 

   The court ruled in favor of the defendant as the Bitcoin transactions were not done on a federally recognized crypto exchange, after consulting both the Central Bank and the state’s Islamic department. The plaintiff was eventually ordered to cover the latter’s legal fees.

2. This app could save your life

   PSA: You should consider downloading MyresQ, a medical app created to quickly alert any of its 5,805 qualified rescuers that are nearby for time-critical medical emergencies, particularly heart issues. Launched in March, MyresQ has been utilized in 459 cases locally, with more than a quarter being for sudden cardiac arrest. The app also has 360 automated external defibrillators (AED) registered.

4. AROUND THE WORLD 🌎

More Trump actions:

Trump pledges 25% tariff on Mexico and Canada, extra 10% tariff on China
Trump is ready to continue with his “America First” economic policy as he prepares for the White House. Recently, the US President-elect has pledged to set a 25% tariff on all goods from Mexico and Canada and an “additional” 10% tariff on Chinese products, as long as the countries don’t settle the problem of irregular border crossings and drug trafficking into the US. The announcement sent international markets on their feet - currencies including CAD, MXN, EUR, GBP, KRW and AUD dropped against the US dollar, while most of Asia’s main stock indexes fell, with Japan’s Nikkei 225 leading the losses with a 1.59% decline as of 2pm local time yesterday.

The proposals have potentially enormous ramifications for international trade, although Trump has made similar threats in the past without following through. Numerous economists have warned that Trump’s proposals for broad-based tariffs would raise the cost of everyday items in the US and dampen global growth. China, Mexico and Canada are the US’s three biggest trading partners, accounting for USD830 bil (RM3.7 tril) of US exports and USD1.43 tril of US imports, respectively, in 2022, according to the Office of the US Trade Representative.

All his court problems go away
The special prosecutor who brought criminal cases against Trump has apparently asked to have the charges dropped, citing a Justice Department policy that bans the prosecution of a sitting president. The charges on Trump are allegations that he illegally sought to overturn the 2020 election and improperly storing classified documents.

After leaving office from his first tenure as the US President, Trump crossed into unprecedented legal territory for a former president, becoming the first to face a criminal trial and later conviction, in a case tied to a payment made to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels. At the beginning of the year, he faced nearly 100 criminal charges connected to the two federal cases mentioned above, and others. Now almost all those charges have been dropped, with a Georgia state prosecution currently on pause. Trump’s return to the White House also left several state-level criminal cases against him in limbo, and the sentencing for his criminal conviction in the state of New York has been indefinitely delayed as well.

AI things:

139-year-old Japanese cable maker thrives under global AI boom
Fujikura Ltd, a lesser-known 139-year-old Japanese cable company has become a stock market star, thanks to a global boom in AI that requires massive construction of data centres with electricity supplies and communication networks. It became the best performer on the Nikkei 225 Stock Average index, with its shares surging more than 400% this year, giving it a market cap of USD10.2 bil. Fujikura specialises in fibre optic cables, with its products having some of the smallest diameters in the industry, which allows them to be used in narrow spaces without the need for additional tunnelling. The company boosted its operating income guidance earlier this month by 17% to JPY104bil (RM3.03 bil) for the current financial year. It gets over 70% of its revenue overseas, with about 38% coming from the United States alone.

UK police warns increased risk of sextortion, scams and child abuse using AI
Police in the UK have warned that the use of AI has apparently garnered attraction from paedophiles, scammers, hackers and criminals of all kinds, who are able to exploit AI to target its victims in new and harmful ways. During the National Police Chiefs’ Council conference in London, senior police officers revealed concerns over emerging AI “heists” using deepfake technology to impersonate company executives and trick their colleagues into transferring large sums of money. The biggest AI exploit is by paedophiles, who have been using generative AI to create images and videos depicting child sexual abuse. Another crime by AI is sextortion, a type of online blackmail in which criminals threaten to release indecent images of victims unless they pay money or carry out demands. Hackers also use AI to look for weaknesses in targeted code or software and to provide “areas of focus” for cyber-attacks. Police need to move as rapidly as the AI technology to keep up with the increasing threats. Are our enforcement agencies ready for this?

Deadliest place for women is home, says UN report on gender violence
In conjunction with the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has published a 36-page report on gender violence. In essence, the deadliest place for women is home as the majority of the killings were done by an intimate partner or a family member, and it happens all over the world, despite efforts to prevent the killing of women and girls by countries.

Some alarming key findings in numbers for the year 2023:

• About 60% of 85,000 women and girls killed across the world were at the hands of an intimate partner or a family member, with an average of 140 a day.

• Africa has the highest number of female victims with an estimated 21,700 women and girls killed this way, and also has the highest number of victims relative to the size of its population – 2.9 victims per 100,000.

View report: Femicides in 2023: Global estimates of intimate partner/family member femicides

Shorts:

1. Policeman killed and dozens injured at Imran Khan’s release protest in Pakistan

   Imran Khan is not giving up on his demands to be released - in the latest protest march he dubbed “final call”, supporters from his party Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) clashed with security forces outside the capital Islamabad, forcing an enforced a security lockdown for the past two days in the country. The protest led to one police officer killed, at least 119 others injured and 22 police vehicles torched. The defence minister claimed that the government had held talks with PTI to calm down the situation, but a senior PTI leader said that no negotiations had occurred with the government.

2. Suriname president announced plans to share oil wealth with its people

   President Chan Santokhi has announced that its citizens would receive an amount of USD750 (RM3,343) in a savings account, with an annual interest rate of 7% as a benefit from the recent discovery of oil and gas reserves. The Latin American nation (view on map) of 600,000 people stands to make about USD10bil in the next 10 to 20 years. Almost one in five Surinamese people today live in poverty, according to World Bank figures. Annual GDP is about USD3.4bil. The country refuses to fall into the “oil curse”, a disease that had befallen other resource-rich countries that were unable to turn oil wealth into economic success. Learning from Norway, a country who “escaped” the curse, Suriname proactively sets up a sovereign wealth fund in expectation of the oil cash influx.

3. Russia warns the West over ideas of supplying nuclear weapons to Ukraine

   Russia is wary about American politicians suggesting US President Joe Biden to give Ukraine nuclear weapons, a move that they consider as preparation for a nuclear war against Russia. Its senior security official Dmitry Medvedev said on Tuesday that if the West supplied nuclear weapons to Ukraine, then Moscow could consider such a transfer to be tantamount to an attack on Russia, providing grounds for a nuclear response.

5. FOR YOUR EYES 📺

1. Is there a more efficient way of boarding an airplane? There is, but why don’t the airlines use it?

2. In most countries, fossil fuels are the main cause of emissions. However, there are some countries where this is not the case.

You made it halfway through the week! Here’s a cute doggie bas sekolah for you to destress.