pre-stroke- my life as a contractor

sometime in 1993, i was restless and full of desire of wanting to make more money, so i managed to get a company going, ishkam sdn bhd. at that time i did not know what business i was going to do. all i had was seed money of around rm200,000/-, the fruits of my consultancy work for nissho-iwai, through one abdullah ali who is now a high flier and multimillionaire with a company called apex. i then established an office in wisma central. this was supposed to be shared with one big-mouth called ezani. alas he stood me up, the first among many by acquaintances in my contracting life. nevertheless i proceeded on and hired a secretary and within a short time obtained my first contract which is a subcontract from mmc, my previous employer. i subcontract the whole work to transwater and at the end of it pocketed a commission of around rm40,000/-, some of which i had to dispense to the relevant mmc general manager. that was my first outlay in bribes. subsequently abdullah gave me a tender document from gas malaysia, a tender which he was not able to participate, neither was i able to. so he introduced me to some australians who were holed up in the micasa hotel, they were from an outfit called MAJOR CITY GAS. together with them and guided by a previous submission by NKK given to me by mazlan othman, we submitted our proposal to gas malaysia for the GARDENIA NATURAL GAS DISTRIBUTION PROJECT IN SHAH ALAM.With the assistance of siraj, a former colleague in mmc who was then the ceo of gas malaysia, surprise, surprise my what a surprise???, we secured the contract with a price of approximately rm1.3 million ringgit. so began my real contracting life Thats how pigas, formerly ishkam sdn bhd, started as a pipeline contractor,with a never-ending stream of work in the next ten years, with the biggest contract being the ampang hospital project valued at roughly rm 440 million. It all ended disastrously in the year 2001 due to the greed and connivance of one mamak, iqbal feiruz khan, the chief extortionist of the rafeek khan family , now residing somewhere in kg tunku. there are a lot of story to be told and it will be told here, warts and all, in future postings up to 30th. september 2010