When Khazanah, Malaysia’s sovereign wealth investment vehicle, set about looking for a new managing director, it faced a problem: half the senior figures in public policy with any experience in finance had already been ousted.
It settled upon one of the few public sector chief executives in Malaysia still standing with any credibility: Datuk Shahril Ridza Ridzuan, CEO of the Employees Provident Fund.
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| Datuk Shahril Ridza Ridzuan |
Shahril was interviewed at length in Euromoney’s April edition, where he spoke about the fund’s ESG ambitions, and its attempts to bring Islamic finance into the institutional rather than just the retail mainstream. The EPF is the biggest pension fund in the country by far, with RM768.51 billion (just under $200 billion) under management at the end of 2017, with assets equivalent to more than half the capitalization of the Malaysia Stock Exchange.
As one of the few major institutions that seems to have escaped connection with the 1MDB scandal, and with scandal in general – one allegation apart, which the EPF says is a fraud and has referred to the police – it is little surprise the EPF was tapped for the Khazanah role.
