Khazanah & PNB lost around RM43.9mil in “fire sale” of FashionValet, MOF reveals

On Monday evening, the Ministry of Finance (MOF) revealed that Khazanah Nasional Bhd and Permodalan Nasional Bhd (PNB) had sold their RM47 million stakes in FashionValet for just RM3.1 million in late 2023, in what some called a “fire sale”.

This came from a written reply on the Parliament’s website to a query from Puchong MP Yeo Bee Yin, who had asked for details of the transaction, and whether other government-linked companies or government-linked investment companies had also invested in FashionValet.

In 2018, Khazanah had invested RM27 million into FashionValet while PNB invested RM20 million, both for minority stakes in the company, according to MOF’s published reply.

At the end of 2023, Khazanah and PNB had then sold their stakes to NXBT Partners Sdn Bhd, an investment holding company owned by Afzal Bin Abdul Rahim, who is also the CEO of TIME dotCom Berhad.

Afzal is also a founding board member of Endeavor Malaysia and a senior independent director at CIMB.

The nature of NXBT Partners is “Activities of holding companies”. A holding company typically exists for the sole purpose of controlling other companies.

NXBT now owns 51.25% (2,513,467) of the company’s total shares (4,904,325), with other shareholders being Vivy Yusof and her husband Fadzarudin, along with a number of corporate bodies.

MyEG Capital is also a shareholder with 283,246 ordinary shares. MyEG Capital had actually given FashionValet its seed funding of RM1 million in 2012.

Back in September, we looked into FashionValet’s financial documents to verify various facts and numbers, and you can read about our findings here.

For now, it’s unclear where FashionValet is headed, but perhaps with Afzal at the helm now, we’ll see some changes being made to turn business around, as its reported earnings for the financial year ended December 31, 2023, stood at -RM127,576,371.

Featured Image Credit: Khazanah Nasional / PNB