KUALA LUMPUR – Members of Lembaga Tabung Haji’s (LTH) board, the boards of its subsidiaries, senior management and officers involved in a series of troubled investments should be held accountable for the losses suffered by the pilgrimage fund, according to the Royal Commission of Inquiry (RCI).
In its report, the Commission concluded that those responsible at every level of LTH’s governance and decision-making structure should be held answerable for the losses incurred by LTH and its related subsidiaries following years of problematic investments.
The Commission found that LTH’s investment governance was plagued by weak oversight, poor coordination and an ineffective decision-making process, with investment proposals heavily dependent on senior management while the Investment Panel failed to exercise the level of independence and scrutiny expected of it.
It also found that ministers who approved investment proposals relied entirely on memoranda prepared by LTH’s board and management, with no independent third-party advice.
“Documents reviewed by the Commission consistently carried the endorsement “approved as proposed”, highlighting what it described as an absence of meaningful external scrutiny,” it said in its report.
The Commission further recommended that forensic audits be carried out into a series of problematic investments to determine how the decisions were made and why they resulted in severe impairment of LTH’s assets.
Among the investments identified for forensic review were PT TH Indo Plantations, Emrail Sdn. Bhd., Wellspring Worldwide Limited, Deru Semangat Sdn. Bhd., Trurich Resources Sdn. Bhd., Al-Rawda Real Estates Development & Project Management Co. Ltd., TH Plantations Berhad, TH Marine, TH Hotel & Residences and FGV Berhad.
The report highlighted numerous governance lapses across these investments, including inadequate due diligence, weak oversight by the Investment Panel, failures in monitoring investment performance and decisions that ultimately resulted in substantial impairment losses running into hundreds of millions of ringgit.
Among the most significant findings was LTH’s investment in FGV Berhad, where the Commission questioned why the fund continued holding its shares despite a steep decline in value, noting that the transfer of the shares to UJSB at acquisition cost prevented what could have been an estimated RM1.1 billion loss.
The Commission stressed that identifying those responsible and subjecting the questionable investments to forensic examination would be essential to strengthening governance and restoring public confidence in the management of pilgrims’ savings. – July 30, 2026