ON the 83rd floor of the Petronas Twin Towers last week, Tengku Muhammad Taufik Tengku Aziz, the president and CEO of Petroliam Nasional Bhd (Petronas), met up with The Edge for a 2½-hour interview, the longest that any CEO of the national oil company has had with us so far.
And the hours seemed to pass very quickly with humorous exchanges and banter, but with all questions answered and peppered with facts on the oil company and its direction. It was a frank and good interview.
Then again, the times they are a-changing and for the first time since it was set up in 1974 to become the custodian of the country’s hydrocarbon resources and main regulatory body for upstream activities by concessionaires such as Shell and ExxonMobil at the time Petronas may slip into the red. It is a situation brought about by the total collapse of the oil and gas (O&G) market and economic standstill owing to Covid-19 and impairments from the acquisition of assets a few years ago, when things were