While a billionaire family tears itself apart in Malaysian courts, the system that made their fortune grinds on—Borneo's ancient rainforests are still being converted to cash at a staggering pace, and nothing seems able to stop it.
This article relies entirely on publicly available court filings, NGO reports, and mainstream‑media coverage (linked below). All dollar amounts are documented estimates. Parties named are invited to send clarifications or rebuttals to [email protected].
In the pre-dawn darkness of February 4, 2024, security cameras captured a black Toyota Alphard pulling away from Normah Medical Specialist Centre in Kuching, Malaysia. Inside, 87-year-old Abdul Taib Mahmud lay unconscious in the back seat, his breathing labored. His wife Raghad, 43 years his junior, had allegedly disconnected him from oxygen and wheeled him out against doctors' protests. Within hours, police would open an investigation for potential endangerment of life. Seventeen days later, on February 21, Taib was dead.
What Raghad was really fighting for became clear in the months that followed. The hospital drama was just the latest battle in a war over $21 billion—a fortune built from the systematic destruction of one of Earth's oldest rainforests, according to a 2012 Bruno Manser Fund study.
Even before Taib's death, his sons had sued their stepmother over shares worth $70 million, naming their own father as a defendant while he served as state governor. They claimed the shares were stolen from their dead mother through forged signatures.
Abdul Taib Mahmud with his Syrian wife, Ragad Waleed Alkurdi Taib during the birthday celebration for Sultan of Brunei in 2011. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
In December 2024, a Malaysian court handed control of the estate to son Abu Bekir, defeating Raghad's bid. But here's what makes this more than just another story of billionaire family dysfunction: while they fight over the money in courtrooms, the machine that generated it is still running.
Right now, as you read this, chainsaws are cutting through Borneo. Between 2019 and 2023, Sarawak lost 423,500 hectares of forest. That's 0.16 hectares every minute. In the 20 minutes it takes to read this article, another three hectares will fall—trees that stood for centuries, ecosystems that took millennia to evolve, gone forever.
Satellite images of deforestation in Sarawak, according to Google Earth.
The man who built this machine is dead, but his creation doesn't need him anymore. The timber companies he empowered still operate. Regulatory capture still continues. International NGOs, including the Bruno Manser Fund, say the Taib family’s web of more than 400 companies continues to operate through financial centres worldwide.
To understand how we got here—how one man's greed became an unstoppable system destroying one of Earth's most vital ecosystems—you have to understand what Taib Mahmud figured out that his predecessors didn't.
When Taib became Chief Minister of Sarawak in 1981, he had a modest civil servant's salary and big ambitions. Previous leaders were widely accused of collecting kickbacks on logging licences. Taib wanted everything.
His first move was brilliant in its simplicity: he appointed himself Finance Minister and Natural Resources Minister simultaneously, concentrating unprecedented power in one pair of hands. Then, in 1985, he made his masterstroke—he dissolved Sarawak's forestry department entirely. No more environmental assessments. No more bureaucrats asking questions. Just one man's signature between virgin rainforest and chainsaw.
But even Taib couldn't physically oversee the destruction of 12.4 million hectares of forest. He needed lieutenants—companies that could handle the dirty work while keeping his hands seemingly clean. He chose carefully, selecting ethnic Chinese businessmen who understood the unspoken rules. Pay your tributes, don't ask questions, and you'll become richer than you ever imagined.
Tiong Hiew King's Rimbunan Hijau grew from a local timber company into a global empire operating in 15 countries with annual revenues exceeding $1 billion. The Yaw family's Samling Group received concessions covering 1.37 million hectares—an area larger than Connecticut.
Together with WTK, KTS, Shin Yang, and Ta Ann Holdings (run by Taib's own cousin), these became known as the Big Six. By 2012, these companies collectively controlled over 3.7 million hectares of Sarawak's forests.
The money flowed in amounts that boggled the mind. Japanese tax investigators uncovered just one scheme where nine shipping companies paid 1.1 billion yen ($9.7 million) in kickbacks to Hong Kong shell company Regent Star, controlled by Taib's brother Onn Mahmud. These "brokerage fees" were mandatory—no payment, no export permit.
"The money then flowed through a web of offshore entities - Richfold Investment in Hong Kong, TESS Investments in the British Virgin Islands, Sogo Holdings in Jersey," according to investigations by the Bruno Manser Fund.
Follow that money and you find the Abraham Lincoln Building in Seattle, which ironically houses the FBI's Northwestern headquarters. You find Ottawa's gleaming Preston Square towers, controlled by Taib's daughter Jamilah through Sakto Corporation—a company established in 1983 when she was just 23, with initial funding of CAD$69.8 million from unexplained family wealth. You find an £8.5 million apartment near London's Hyde Park.
Each building stands as a monument to Borneo's destruction, ancient trees transformed into glass and steel.
Coal mines like the Lumbung Mine are having a huge impact on local and indigenous populations in Indonesia, destroying the environment and polluting river water, normally used for cooking. Central Kalimantan, Borneo. June 8th 2013.
The genius of Taib's system was its vertical integration. His family's company, Cahya Mata Sarawak (CMS), built the roads that enabled logging. CMS produced the cement that paved over cleared land. CMS won the contracts to construct government buildings where more logging licenses were approved.
Between 1993 and 2013, this single company received 89 documented contracts worth $1.4 billion—all without competitive bidding. The contracts included the RM295 million construction of Sarawak's State Assembly Building and exclusive road maintenance worth RM86 million annually.
While billions flowed into offshore accounts, the true cost accumulated in villages across Borneo. In West Kalimantan, palm oil company PT Ledo Lestari forcibly relocated 93 households. Francesca, a 28-year-old Iban Dayak mother, returned home to find company representatives had burned her house with all possessions inside after her husband refused to sell their land. The families received compensation of just $70-140 per hectare—a fraction of the land's true value.
An estimated 2.5 million indigenous people have been displaced across Borneo since the 1970s, an exodus of forest peoples that represents one of the largest forced migrations in modern history. The Penan, who lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers for millennia, saw their way of life destroyed in a single generation. Today, only 200 remain truly nomadic out of 16,000.
"Forest means everything," Penan leader Mormonus explained before his arrest for organizing protests. "Forest provides water. Water is blood... land is body, wood is breath. When we lost the forest, we lost everything."
The companies destroying these forests weren't shadowy operations but publicly traded corporations with government connections. Rimbunan Hijau's founder now controls major newspapers across Southeast Asia while his brother serves in the state assembly. Samling's shares were held by Taib's cousin and his spiritual advisor.
The marriage of timber money and political power created an unbreakable circle—timber companies funded politicians who granted more concessions which generated profits that funded more politicians. The corruption became so complete it stopped being seen as corruption. It was just business.
By the 2000s, Taib's machine had evolved beyond his control, beyond anyone's control. The Swiss NGO Bruno Manser Fund mapped out 400 companies across 25 countries connected to the Taib family, from the British Virgin Islands to Australia.
"We believe our research is showing merely the tip of the iceberg as many family assets are likely to be hidden overseas or in offshore districts where information is virtually impossible to obtain," the Fund stated in their 2012 report.
Swiss parliamentarians called for asset freezes after investigations revealed suspicious transactions through Swiss banks including UBS, Pictet, and Edmond de Rothschild, which allegedly administered over $100 million for the family. Canadian activists pressed for money laundering investigations.
Leaked U.S. diplomatic cables from 2006 showed American officials knew everything: "Taib is widely thought to extract a percentage from most major commercial contracts–including those for logging–awarded in the state."
None of it mattered. The Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission opened 15 separate case files against Taib between 2011-2016, only to close them all. MACC Chief Mohd Shukri Abdull claimed in 2018 that "no cases could be linked to Taib as decisions were made by others"—a legal technicality in Malaysian law that protects officials who don't personally sign corrupt documents.
In 2014, as international pressure mounted, Taib pulled his final trick—he stepped down as Chief Minister and was appointed Governor of Sarawak, a position that granted him sovereign immunity. The man who allegedly stole billions became constitutionally untouchable.
This is where the story should end—the villain dies wealthy and unpunished. But the machine Taib built doesn't need him anymore. It has evolved, spread, metastasized.
In neighboring Sabah, Chief Minister Musa Aman received US$63.3 million in timber kickbacks between 2004-2008, following Taib's template exactly. His intermediary Michael Chia was caught smuggling SG$16 million through Hong Kong airport in 2008. Across the border in Indonesian Borneo, regional governors auction forest concessions to the highest bidder.
The system Taib created has become the operating system for Southeast Asian deforestation.
The climate implications ripple globally. Borneo's rainforests store more carbon per hectare than almost anywhere on Earth. When burned for palm oil plantations, they release massive emissions while eliminating one of the planet's most effective carbon sinks. The smoke regularly shrouds Southeast Asia, causing respiratory disease from Singapore to Bangkok.
KONICA MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERA
We're destroying our own life support system and calling it development.
Drive through Sarawak today and you'll see what Taib's legacy looks like on the ground. Oil palm plantations stretch to every horizon where rainforest once stood, a monotonous green desert supporting no life but the crop. You'll pass luxury car dealerships in towns where indigenous children suffer malnutrition. You'll see timber company headquarters built with Italian marble and gold fixtures, monuments to greed in a landscape of loss.
And you'll see logging trucks, still rolling, still loaded with ancient trees, heading for ports where cargo ships wait to carry Borneo's heritage to furniture stores in Tokyo and New York.
The saddest part is we know exactly how to stop this. Revoke the licenses. Freeze the assets. Arrest the perpetrators. Protect what's left. The solutions are simple; the political will is absent.
The machine Taib built now owns the very people who could dismantle it. Campaign finances flow from timber companies. Politicians' children get scholarships and jobs. The current Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, despite reform promises, has taken no meaningful action on Sarawak's deforestation.
That hospital scene last February—Raghad wheeling her dying husband into the night—captures something essential about this whole story. There's a desperation to it, a grasping for wealth even as life slips away.
Taib spent his final years watching his children sue each other, his legacy reduced to courtroom battles over money that represents millions of displaced people and a wounded planet. The man who suffocated a rainforest died struggling for breath, but the machine he built keeps breathing, keeps consuming, keeps destroying.
Studies suggest that more than 90 %—and by some estimates up to 95 %—of Sarawak’s intact rainforest has already been logged. An area the size of England, gone. The Big Six timber companies generated billions in revenue while leaving a trail of devastation—423,500 hectares destroyed between 2019-2023 alone.
Forests that had survived ice ages, that had sheltered human civilizations for 40,000 years, that contained more biodiversity than science had even catalogued—reduced to stumps and ash in a single generation.
And for what? So the Taib family could accumulate $21 billion. So timber companies could post record profits. So a small elite could vacation in London while the people whose land they stole struggle to survive.
As I write this, chainsaws are cutting somewhere in Borneo. Tomorrow, they'll cut again. When the last orangutan dies—nearly 150,000 lost in just 16 years—when the last Penan elder who remembers the forest passes away, when Taib's great-grandchildren fight over the remnants of their environment-destructive profit, the machine will still be running.
This is Taib Mahmud's true monument: not the buildings his money bought or the fortune his family squabbles over, but a system so perfectly designed for destruction that it no longer needs its creator. He showed the world that with enough audacity and systematic corruption, you could steal an entire ecosystem and get away with it.
Others learned the lesson. The machine runs on.
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