Ever since he married into it, Sean Murray, now Hisham Murray-Taib, has acted on the basis that money talks.

The Ottawa businessman runs the Sarawak governor Taib Mahmud’s multi-million dollar family companies across North America, including SAKTO Corporation Canada, with an aggressive stance against anyone who dares to point out that they have been funded through illicit transfers of purloined Malaysian assets by his kleptocrat father-in-law.

The big money strategy has involved buying deep into the Ottawa establishment, becoming known as a major political and charitable donor, whilst at the same time purchasing expensive and threatening lawyers and PR firms to ward off scrutiny.

Against Sarawak Report Murray has pitched the notorious London SLAPP suit litigators, Mission de Reya, to issue libel threats, as well as having hired no less than two now discredited ‘Black PR’ companies (Bell Pottinger and FBC Media) to personally defame and harass the editor through major online vilification campaigns.

These dirty, bully-boy tactics reached new heights more recently during Murray’s battles against the Swiss NGO, Bruno Manser Fund, which has sought to champion the native people of Sarawak whose lands have been decimated by the rampant, kleptocratic logging and plantation businesses controlled by Murray’s father-in-law, the autocratic Taib Mahmud.

Murray initially achieved stunning results by hiring heavy handed lawyers and politically influential lobbyists in Canada, and then taking his offensive against the NGO right into the Swiss courts with a punishingly expensive libel action.

However, a ruling by the prestigious international body the OECD on Monday, whilst slow in coming, has turned the matter on its head.

That ruling has condemned the Canadian Government decisions that earlier favoured SAKTO Corporation and in the process it has revealed the exact nature of the big-money influence and pressure Sean Murray brought to bear against the NGO, demanding that the Canadian authorities now take the matter properly in hand and repair the damage done to BMF.

Six Year Battle Finally Turns To Favour BMF

Sean Murray has pursued the NGO ever since it dared to suggest back in 2016 that his wife, Jamilah Taib,’s family company in Canada, SAKTO Corporation, owed far greater transparency as an international corporation than the level of disclosure being provided to the Canadian authorities. SAKTO’s argument was that it was merely a multi-million dollar ‘family company’ and so exempt.

BMF had appealed to the international Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to review the matter according to its own rules which Canada is bound by through international treaties.  The NGO was entirely within its rights to raise the complaint under the OECD’s own guidelines.

After all, BMF was concerned that financial information about SAKTO’s sources of income was being concealed which would have publicly confirmed that the company’s Canadian investments flowed from kleptocratic abuses in Sarawak (as demonstrated time and again by this site) as opposed to the Murray family’s myth that their wealth had nothing to do with the Taib’s but had come from their own earlier business dealings over two generations.

BMF’s complaint had initially received prompt and positive attention from Canada’s ‘National Contact Point’ within the Ottawa government.

In October 2016 the NGO formally received an 11 page fully argued draft assessment of the OECD response which upheld each and every one of BMF’s concerns, and likewise denied the counter-arguments put forward by Sakto’s lawyers during the negotiating process – meaning that SAKTO Corporation ought indeed be defined as an international organisation and to therefore publish comprehensive financial statements.

The stark recommendation was that the OECD should ‘proceed to a full review of the Sakto Group and the complaints relating to its shortcomings’, referring in the process to the OECD guidelines supported by the Government of Canada.

However, at that point matters suddenly stalled and the influence of hidden hands started to become only too apparent. As Sarawak Report detailed in March 2017:

BMF eventually became aware of a considerable delay in proceeding to the review.  When the NGO enquired about the delay the OECD officials explained in November of 2011:
“The NCP has received extensive commentary from Sakto’s legal counsel, which we are now in the process of reviewing. We thank you for your understanding. Please be assured that the NCP is doing its best to move this process forward as quickly as possible.”
Six months later, however, instead of proceeding to the review, the Canadian OECD Contact Point completely reversed its original recommendations, without providing a single explanation why!
A new Draft Assessment was created, which consisted of a mere one and a half pages, simply dismissing the complaint, without any of the detailed breakdown provided by the original document that had supported the BMF concerns.
In a brief letter, the Chairman of the Canadian National Contact Point (NCP) for the OECD explained merely:
‘The NCP regrets that the process has taken longer than usual. The NCP has duly considered the submissions from the parties and conducted its due diligence in the most expeditious manner as was possible…..”

For Lukas Straumann, the Director of BMF, the change represented an outrageous and unexplained volte face by the Canadian office of the OECD:

“The Canadian NCP of the OECD produced an extensive initial draft assessment that was highly detailed and closely argued, according to the legal position and guidelines on OECD policy. This initial assessment accepted BMF’s position on each and every point and rejected Sakto’s own submissions. It made clear that the Taib family’s Sakto group is indeed in breach of the OECD’s disclosure standards for multinational enterprises. That process had taken over a year.
Then, suddenly, a last minute heavy intervention by Sakto’s lawyers was allowed to delay the entire process and the NCP went completely silent about what new representations were being made or what other interferences were taking place.  The outcome has been a total reversal of their original closely explained findings, which has been replaced by a one page rejection of our submissions, without analysis or explanation. Where is the supposed transparency required by the OECD’s own guidelines, which the Government of Canada is supposed to adhere to? [Lukas Straumann]

 

The reasons behind the change of heart very soon became clear as a local expose by the Canadian news outlet Ricochet detailed exactly how Sean Murray had used not only legal clout but his political contacts to bring heavy-handed pressure onto the OECD officials based in Canada to alter their conclusions.

Sarawak Report covered the story in 2019 which detailed how Sean Murray had picked up the phone to a family friend and neighbour who happened to be their local Ottawa MP with influential contacts in the Government (the Murrays had recently accommodated his daughter at one of their London apartments).

The individual to whom Sean then directed his call, as his lawyers have now acknowledged to Ricochet’s reporter Tim Wilson, was the Ottawa MP Andrew Leslie, who has now issued a statement admitting he responded to Sean’s request by seeking to influence the OECD position on the matter.
“Sakto reached out to Andrew Leslie as the Member of Parliament at the time for Ottawa-Vanier to make him aware of the OECD proceedings,” wrote [SAKTO] lawyer Duncan Fraser in an email.
In a personal letter to the Murrays dated May 28, 2018, Leslie said that they had asked him for help as the MP “overseeing the Ottawa-Vanier riding office” in November 2016. Leslie recounted that the Murrays had drawn his attention to “the troubling campaign against you and your family by the Swiss activist group Bruno Manser Fonds.”

Leslie apparently started lobbying on SAKTO’s behalf in the matter with the Minister of International Trade. At the same time the company’s lawyers made submissions to Canada’s Deputy Minister of Justice.  The pushback clearly upset the team at the OECD, which revealed at the time to the Bruno Manser Fund that it was dealing with “extensive commentary from Sakto’s legal counsel’ which was causing delay in finalising its draft findings.
In fact, the OECD at the time complained at this very interference:
The first time that Canada’s OECD NCP came to a decision about the Sakto case, it issued a statement that differed in major ways from the one issued in 2018……
The statement also listed problems that had arisen during the NCP process. It was critical of Sakto for mounting an “aggressive challenge of the NCP’s jurisdiction,” noting that Sakto had involved an MP in the confidential process and that Sakto’s legal counsel had made submissions to Canada’s Deputy Minister of Justice [Francois Champagne]. BMF was chastised for breaching confidentiality during the process by publishing an initial draft assessment and for drawing inappropriate media attention to it.
Eight months after the NCP’s decision, Leslie wrote his letter to Champagne. In it, he defended his intervention in the NCP process and told the minister of international trade that BMF had a “vendetta” against Abdul Taib Mahmud, who remains a controversial political leader in Malaysia.
Nevertheless, the zeal with which the MP pursued his aim of protecting his friends from a ‘vendetta’ of public scrutiny by the Bruno Manser Fund (which campaigns for indigenous rights in the face of timber corruption in Sarawak) is surely quite exceptional, in that he even went after staff at the OECD involved in the report.
It seems to have worked a treat:
Leslie then suggested that the minister’s office “conduct an investigation into the conduct of the relevant officials” handling the NCP process. It is unknown if anything came of this proposed investigation.
But the NCP revised its statement and released another final decision — this one several pages shorter than the original.
All references to “multinational” were removed, as was any mention of Sakto involving an MP and making submissions to the Department of Justice. The criticism of BMF for releasing the initial draft document remained.
Whereas the draft OECD report had recommended that SAKTO was an international company involving inter-country transfers of cash and therefore ought to open its finances to scrutiny, the revised version concluded the opposite and did not recommend SAKTO publish its finances. [article by Ricochet 2019]

With the complaint thus dismissed, albeit under highly dubious circumstances, by the OECD representatives in Canada Sean Murray was triumphant.

Citing the dismissal of the legitimate official request by BMF as if there had been a court judgement against the NGO, he swiftly moved to a libel action in Switzerland targeted at punishing costs and damages and demanding the NGO remove everything it has ever written about the Taib family and timber corruption anywhere in print and online.

Despite the costs of that legal action BMF have held out against the years long case, raising support from Swiss supporters who care about deforestation, Sarawak and its people.

Meanwhile, the NGO and other supporting organisations, including the integrity group OECD Watch (which cited longstanding weaknesses in Canada’s National Contact Point and in its adherence to OECD rules) mounted an official complaint to the OECD’s central Investment Committee about the whole affair, and specifically the undue political pressure brought to bear against the organisation’s local officials by an elected member of the Canadian government.

This complaint was taken up and today’s top level OECD ruling was entirely in favour of BMF, castigating the Canadian government’s handling of the affair and condemning the final revised report saying that it:

  • Lacked transparency and was limited in its accountability
  • Was not fully equitable
  • Contributed towards a perception of lack of impartiality
  • Lacked predictability
  • Was not fully compatible with the Procedural Guidance set by the OECD Investment Committee

Significantly, the OECD committee also said it took seriously the concerns about the harm that had been done to BMF by Canada’s lamentable handling of the case, which had given Sean Murray his opportunity to open legal proceedings against the NGO on the grounds their case against the company had been found unjustified.

The committee recommended that the Canadian Government address this concern by following up with the parties and taking “any appropriate measure within its mandate to mitigate the adverse effects, if any, of this specific instance [complaint]“.

[see BMF press release].

The turnaround has utterly vindicated BMF and enormously exposed the Taib Murray family who will now be under immense pressure to open up their accounts which they have resisted for so long.

With Sean Murray’s tactics so blatantly exposed it seems unlikely his political allies will once more seek to protect SAKTO against the final, top-level ruling of the OECD or sanction the under-hand tactics that he used.

Meanwhile, over in Europe the Swiss libel suit has been holed under the water. Murray’s argument, seemingly at times to have been accepted by a judge, was that no official body or court of law has yet to uphold a case or confirm wrongdoings against Sarawak’s politically protected leading family and their assets (despite the litany of evidence of grand kleptocracy available against them).

Today that claim to reputation looks far less officially intact following this ruling by the OECD.