Telekom Malaysia (TM) has announced that its current chairman, Rosli Man has resigned from his post which he has held since December 2018. At the same time, the company has also revealed that Mohd Bakke Salleh (shown above) has been appointed as its new chairman starting from 11 May 2020.
We expect this to change very soon but at the moment, Bakke Salleh is currently serving as the chairman of Federal Land Development Authority (FELDA). He was appointed to that role last year and his tenure in FELDA is supposed to last at least until 30 June 2021.
Rosli Man was a pure telco man who started his career back in 1976 when TM is still known as Jabatan Telekom and has also involved in setting up Celcom back in 1988. This is stark contrast to Bakke which is a well-known figure within the corporate and financial sector.
According to the profile provided by TM, Bakke’s starter his journey by an Audit Senior at Ernst & Young in 1983. From there, he has trailblazed through various private and federal agencies over the years including Citibank, Lembaga Tabung Haji, Bank Islam Malaysia, Sime Darby Group, Malaysian Palm Oil Board, and Petronas; just to name a few.
He has also spent some time at the controversial federal-owned strategic development company 1MDB as the chairman. However, his tenure at 1MDB was quite short as he resigned from the company in 2019 shortly after the discovery of massive funds, amounted to USD 1 billion, were transferred out from 1MDB without the approval of the company’s board of directors.
In addition to the differences in their background, the state of TM at the beginning of their tenure will also be quite different. When Rosli Man took over the helm of the company from Dr Sulaiman Mahbob in December 2018, TM has just lost billions of Ringgits in market capitalization.
While TM has yet to fully recover from that the loss of market value in 2017, the company is already in a much better state when Bakke Salleh takes over the duty from Rosli Man this coming Monday. Prior to the recent COVID-19 pandemic, TM was busy aiming to become the country’s main 5G infrastructure provider and trying to cater to the increasing demands of fibre services from customers.
Hence, it is going to be interesting to see how things will transpire at TM within the next few months as not only the company will have a new chairman but also, to see how TM will move forward in the post-MCO era.
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