One officer, the manager said, brought out his immediate superior to negotiate the payment. According to one F&B manager, this practice is not just carried out by a few rogue officers. In addition, they say, Municipal Councils and the fire department also request cash payments above statutory fees to issue the necessary documents required by JAKIM in halal product and premises applications. SME proprietors and F&B managers told Asia Sentinel that JAKIM officials routinely request cash payments above the statutory fees in order to guarantee registration. For many sole proprietors and SMEs who ran traditional businesses, the on-site infrastructure requirements were prohibitive and way beyond their financial means.Ī dark side to the halal certification process has cropped up, however, for a process millions of Malaysians take very seriously but know very little about. SME owners and food and beverage managers of hotels say the major barrier to gaining halal registration is money. In addition, only a small proportion of international hotels and resorts have halal registration. Today, only a small fraction of Malay sole proprietors and SMEs have gained halal certification. It’s only been in the last decade that authorities have been pushing small businesses to seek halal registration. ![]() Any premises suspected of not being halal would just be boycotted by locals. These businesses relied on community recognition. The surroundings and Islamic symbols on the walls with signs saying “bertanggung halal” were enough assurance. Traditionally in Malaysia, stalls, eateries, and restaurants were known to be halal through word of mouth. The rest of the HDC’s activities involve organizing exhibitions as an event manager. ![]() Asia Sentinel visited the Perlis Halal Park in Padang Besar recently and found it mainly empty except for a tenant using the park as a staging point to smuggle goods in and out of Thailand. ![]() All of these, like the Labuan Halal Complex, have few or no tenants. The HDC then morphed into a white elephant operation focused on spending hundreds of millions developing warehousing facilities in what were called Halal Parks with few functions. But in 2009 JAKIM, under mysterious circumstances, took back complete halal certification from the HDC and put it into a newly established department called the Halal Hub Division. One of the casualties is the Malaysian Halal Industry Development Corporation (HDC), established in 2006 to take over halal certification from JAKIM and promote Malaysian halal products internationally. ![]() Industry figures have told Asia Sentinel the agency is deeply corrupt, with bribes routinely charged to certify establishments and products as halal and with a long string of other problems that endanger the entire process of what should be serious attention to religious requirements but which has none of those characteristics. The country’s Department of Islamic Development, known by its Malay acronym JAKIM, is the sole statutory halal certifier although it has neither fully operational forensic laboratories nor experienced staff, despite having enormous and mostly arbitrary power. In Malaysia today, halal practices, or those that adhere to Islamic law, are deeply important for increasingly devout Muslims, who make up more than 60 percent of the population.
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