He had also served as deputy ministers under Abdullah Badawi and Najib Razak administrations. It was not until 2020 that he was made a full minister – Minister of Human Resource – that came with “golden opportunities”.

Born and raised in gang-infested Sentul, it wasn’t hard for Saravanan to click with the big boss of the Malaysian Indian Congress (MIC), a component party of the corrupted Barisan Nasional coalition. After all, Samy Vellu was the infamous Godfather of Indian gangster in the 1980s and 1990s, who served under the Mahathir leadership during his 22 years iron-fist rule (1981-2003).

When Tamil Malar Daily exposed in 2017 how Mr Saravanan stole from the rental collection of the state MIC building, the then-Deputy Youth and Sports Minister brought mobsters to the media office and beat up its General Manager and staff. The attacks saw journalists and employees of the newspaper company left bleeding, injured and even suffered some broken teeth.

But unlike Bollywood films, there was no happy ending for the poor owner and staff of the Tamil Malar Daily. The despicable MIC leader was as untouchable as Prime Minister Najib, who himself had stolen billions in the 1MDB scandal before he lost power in the May 2018 General Election, and whose party – UMNO – had ruled the country almost uninterrupted since independence in 1957.

Also known as “Ganja Saravanan”, he was never arrested, let alone prosecuted, but was let go with a slap on the wrist. As Human Resource Minister under the illegitimate backdoor PM Muhyiddin Yassin (March 2020-August 2021) and PM Ismail Sabri (August 2021-November 2022), the MIC deputy president boldly enriched himself through corruption and money laundering.

In fact, Saravanan was so corrupt that he actually did not deny the involvement of MIC members in the misappropriation of funds from “PenjanaKerjaya” involving a total of RM100 million. The programme-turned-scandal, under Muhyiddin’s National Economic Recovery Plan, offered financial incentives of between RM600 and RM1,000 to employers for each employee or apprentice employed for up to six months.

But the biggest dirty money machine was the hiring of foreign workers into the country. On June 16, 2022, Saravanan said that Bangladesh and Malaysia had agreed to a limit of 25 agencies to recruit Bangladeshi workers for Malaysia. However, the next day, Bangladesh’s Expatriate Welfare and Overseas Employment Minister Imran Ahmad rubbished the statement.

Mr Imran had also clarified that the memorandum of understanding (MoU) signed by both countries did not mention anything about 25 agencies. Worse, despite admitting that there was a surplus of illegal Bangladeshi workers in the country, Saravanan had pushed to bring in more Bangladeshi. And the disgraced human resource minister deliberately set a limit of 25 agencies to create monopoly.

The clueless, incompetent and corrupt regime of Muhyiddin saw the cost of hiring foreign workers shot up from about RM16,000 to RM20,000 per worker because various agencies involved had to “share the money at different levels”. The cost of hiring was incredibly ridiculous that Bangladesh refused to send any workers in 2020 – till a transparent system was in place.

The Bangladeshi government wanted the Malaysian government to connect to their online system to detect irregularities, but was declined. If the Malaysian labour market is allowed to link directly to the Bangladeshi system, it would kill syndicates and middlemen, ending the monopoly and corruption. It’s not rocket science why Saravanan rejected it – he was on top of the food chain of the lucrative market.

To get an idea of how the business has made Saravanan and his cronies mega rich, look no further than the latest operation that was carried out by a Multi-Agency Task Force (MATF) led by the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) on Monday (July 24). Over RM38 million cash and 200kg of gold worth over RM60 million was seized along with 17 luxury vehicles such as Ferrari and Maserati.