O r a l H i st o ry
A Conversation with Tan Sri Dato’
Utama Nor Mohamed Yakcop
In March 2015, as part of our Oral History initiative, the Perdana Leadership
Foundation had a conversation with Tan
Sri Dato’ Utama Nor Mohamed Yakcop,
the former Minister of Finance II for Malaysia and Special Economic Adviser
to the Prime Minister who is now the
Deputy Chairman of Khazanah Nasional
and Chairman of Khazanah Research
Institute. During the conversation, Tan
Sri touched on his career in banking and
in government, and highlighted in particular the 1997-98 crisis during which
he worked very closely with the Prime
Minister of Malaysia, Tun Dr. Mahathir
Mohamad, to construct and apply a
very unique solution to the crisis. The
interviewer for the conversation was
Professor Dr. Mohd Shahwahid Hj Othman, Dean of the Faculty of Economics,
Universiti Putra Malaysia.
Here are excerpts of Tan Sri’s re30 | P e r d a n a M a g a z in e 2 0 1 5
sponses to our questions. A book of
our dialogue with him will be published
as part of our Leadership Conversations series.
to take the train from Prai. Of course,
you could travel to Prai by road but that
would take a very long time. The easiest
way was to cross the river.”
On his hometown
“I was born in Bagan Dalam, a small
kampung in Butterworth which is on the
Penang mainland. The town was very
small and there was a dockyard where
half the people of Bagan Dalam worked.
My father was a shopkeeper on the island of Penang and my mother was a
housewife. When I was about three or
four years old, we moved from the island of Penang back to Butterworth. My
father had a shop in a place called Ujung
Batu, a place where you had to take a
sampan to go to Prai. Prai was where
the railway station was. So anyone from
Butterworth or Penang who wanted to
go to Kuala Lumpur or Ipoh would have
On how he was called in by the Prime
Minister of Malaysia to resolve the currency crisis
“(Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad) called
me and requested that I meet him in Argentina as he was travelling from Cuba
to