Najib makes Foreign Investments easier, but what about the "other" locals?

In addition, the Najib administration is also considering setting up a RM10 billion National Equity Fund. The beneficiaries of the fund will be young Bumiputera companies.

Government officials told The Malaysian Insider that the plan is to identify new companies, take a stake in these entities, help them list on Bursa Malaysia and exit as a shareholder when good returns on the investment are realised.

It is unclear whether this method of nurturing a class of Bumiputera businessmen is going to be different from the discredited approach used in the 1990s to help create corporate captains like Tajudin Ramli and Halim Saad.

The corporate class then benefited from sweetheart deals and government largesse.

Their brittleness was exposed during the Asian Financial Crisis in 1997.

The fund is also an acknowledgement that Najib has to balance the liberalisation of the economy with a safety net for the Bumiputera community and a reaffirmation of a reality of doing business in Malaysia: that the interests of the Malay/Muslim community cannot be ignored by any prime minister.