news feature Sarawak Chief Minister Abdul Taib Mahmud broke his silence on Sunday after much speculation on the current negotiations for a merger between Sarawak-based Utama Banking Group (UBG) owner of Bank Utama and RHB Bank.

He added they should not expect more than what was due to them, but they could anticipate fair treatment from the parties they were dealing with, including authorities such as the state government of Sarawak.

Maintaining his neutral stand on the Bank Utama merger issue, Taib said emphatically: "I have not engaged in the formulation of stand in the Bank Utama negotiation nor engaged in its negotiations."

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Bank Utama is the only bank still left out of the merger process after the rest of the country's banks merged to form the existing 10 anchor banks.

The Sarawak government wants Bank Utama to be an anchor bank and to do that it has to buy into a bank and hold a controlling stake. It hopes to achieve that by taking over the combined stakes from Rashid Hussain and Malaysian Resources Corporation Berhad for a reported RM1.8 billion.

But some shareholders of CMSB think this is much too high a price to pay, not when expectation of profit margins is different than from the past.

However, both Rashid and MRCB want out of the banking business, offering Bank Utama possibly the only opportunity left for an anchor bank status by taking a controlling stake in RHB Bank.