During his twenty-eight years tenure as Sarawak's chief minister, there is no doubt Taib Mahmud has used his power, directly or indirectly, to enrich his family's and extended family's fortune. The list of projects, concessions, permits etc, handed over on silver platters to his family-controlled publicly listed Cahya Mata Sarawak Bhd (CMSB) runs longer than a new, unused toilet roll.

CMSB uncannily reads ‘Chief Minister and Sons' Business', but whether this is by design or an inadvertent acronym has been a source of much speculation in coffee-shop talk. This privileged conglomerate itself holds a mind-boggling array of subsidiaries that span the length and breath and every nook and corner of Sarawak, besides many other less obvious investments in Peninsular Malaysia and even overseas.

His gargantuan appetite for anything and everything that makes money is legendary - you name it, he's in it: property, banking, timber, shipping, construction, industrial, international schools, plantations, hotels, convention centre, retail, manufacturing, IT, even trash collection. If they don't own it outright, they do it stealthily by proxies or cronies or through a maze of labyrinthian holdings and nominee companies.

Taib holds absolute power in Sarawak over every aspect of development, planning, approval, implementing and running of private or public works. A wave of his hand is enough to send bureaucrats scurrying to attend to his behest, be it the approval of alienation of state land to private corporations or getting the nod for a high-rise building, or giving state land to illegal squatters (usually prior to state elections) and many more.

And to his underlings, he does apportions a section of the cake to keep them drooling for more. It will take the will of a saint not to succumb to such a windfall, which can often means an unlimited flow of paychecks in the hundreds of thousands, even millions for the rest of their lives. Thus, in the court of this 'White Hair Raja', we see a phalanx of lap dogs

Big timber corporations, developers, manufacturers etc, pander to his every whim and fancy (like newspapers congratulatory ads on his birthday, anniversary, for example), as timber concessions, licence, permits and so on need to be renewed every years. Errant tycoons ignore this idiosyncrasies at their own peril.

Taib's penchant for donning the Western-style beret and Ray-Ban shaped eye wear on occasion of his rare field visits bespeak of his vanity, while his embrace of hedonism is evident from his palatial home unabashedly adorned with stately furniture and ornate fittings.

Of late, he has been grooming his son Sulaiman to take over the throne, thus ensuring the continuation of the Taib dynasty. A brother, Ali Mahmud, is also a member of Parliament, so is a cousin, daughter of his estranged uncle Tun Rahman Yakub, but now reconciled.

Taib Mahmud is of Melanau stock (a minority ethnic race in Sarawak), and has planted a lot of his own clansmen in key positions in government and statutory bodies. Even the present governor Tun Salahuddin, a Catholic converted to Muslim for the purpose of assuming the governorship, is a Melanau, much to the chagrin of the local Malays who are much more superior in numbers.

Taib Mahmud has made a mockery of Abdullah Ahmad Badawi's pledge to weed out corruption, but that the latter had tolerate the former is understandable as Taib had always made good his side of the bargain in delivering all but one or two of the parliamentary seats in almost all the general elections he has fought.

The above all the more important in view of the last general election in March 2008, where Abdullah would have theoretically lost the election if not for the clean sweep of all but one of the 31 seats in Sarawak.

However, it is easy for Taib as his war chest of millions from his booty and contributions from all the sycophantic cronies makes 'money politics' the 'business as usual' all but a game to play come election time. That this self-crowned 'Sultan of Sarawak' has earned the spite of Sarawak's general populace is putting it in a mild way.

Thus, Abdullah has let Taib Mahmud off the hook, in spite of the latter's continued blatant plunder of the state's resources. Who says there is no honour among robbers? Taib remains the sacred cow, untouchable, untamed and un-topple-able as money politics will almost certainly rear its ugly head again comes the next state election in 2011.

This wily old fox will definitely have something up his sleeve even when the chips are down. In the meantime, still hiding behind the smokescreen of his laughably shallow ‘philosophy' of 'Politics of Development', he continues to plunder, unhindered.

Nevertheless, the pilots of his private jet are on the standby 24/7, just in case he needs to go ‘travelling' in a big hurry.