What Tabung Haji’s buyback numbers really told us

Mohamed Hadi Abd Hamid & Mohd Zaidi Md Zabri

When Lembaga Tabung Haji (TH) announced in July 2026 that it had reclaimed two assets from Urusharta Jamaah Sdn Bhd, the reaction split along predictable lines.

One asset was a parcel of land at the Tun Razak Exchange (TRX). The other was the oil palm plantation now known as UJ Estates (Holdings).

For some, it was proof that the 2018 rescue plan was finally working, eight years on.

For others, the fact that only two assets out of the entire pool transferred to Urusharta Jamaah have come home is proof of the opposite. Whatever remains inside Urusharta Jamaah, they argue, is effectively lost.

Both readings miss what the numbers are actually saying.

The facts of the return are not in dispute. Tabung Haji bought back the TRX land at RM270m, against the RM400m premium value at which it was sold into Urusharta Jamaah in 2018. Tabung Haji had originally bought the TRX land from 1MDB in 2015 for RM188.5m.

Tabung Haji also bought back UJ Estates at RM695m, against a 2018 sale value of RM800m.

In both cases, the repurchase price was lower than the original transfer price. That is despite TRX becoming one of the most actively developed districts in Kuala Lumpur, and the plantation’s income and cash flow having stabilised, according to Tabung Haji itself.

Rising land values around an asset, and a still-lower buyback price after eight years – that combination is worth sitting with. It tells a story that is easy to miss in the celebration of a “successful reacquisition”.

What the 2018 transfer actually did

The restructuring exercise itself is well documented. A gap between assets and liabilities first surfaced in 2017, one that risked breaching the Tabung Haji Act 1995 and threatened continued dividend payouts.

The government responded by setting up Urusharta Jamaah as a special purpose vehicle under the Minister of Finance (Incorporated).

Urusharta Jamaah took over Tabung Haji’s underperforming and non-core assets, paying about RM19.9bn – RM19.6bn in sukuk and RM300m in cash – for assets subsequently valued at closer to RM9.7bn to RM10bn.

The gap between what Urusharta Jamaah paid and what the assets were later found to be worth was, in effect, the price of keeping Tabung Haji solvent on paper at the moment the accounting problem was discovered.

That gap is the part of the story that gets lost when the conversation shifts to “Tabung Haji getting its assets back”.

Urusharta Jamaah was never simply a warehouse holding Tabung Haji’s property in trust. It was a vehicle designed to absorb assets that had already been acquired, often at inflated valuations, by Tabung Haji’s own management in the years before 2018. Its mandate was to rehabilitate those assets over 10 years and eventually redeem the sukuk used to fund the exercise.

Eight years into that mandate, Urusharta Jamaah’s own balance sheet tells a sobering story: total assets of roughly RM11.4bn against total liabilities of roughly RM23.9bn at the end of 2024, alongside accumulated losses of around RM12.4bn – notwithstanding a single profitable year in 2024.

Liabilities more than double the value of the assets meant to cover them is not a picture of rehabilitation nearing completion. It is a picture of an entity still working through what it inherited.

The transfer itself had already become a point of political dispute before the release of the royal commission’s report, with a former Treasury secretary general accused of selling off Tabung Haji’s strategic assets.

The government pushed back on that characterisation. The minister in charge of religious affairs at the Prime Minister’s Department described the 2018 transfer as a collective cabinet decision, not an individual one – taken as a rescue and restructuring measure for assets already judged to be underperforming.

The underlying fact does not change: the assets moved into Urusharta Jamaah because they were already a problem, not because Urusharta Jamaah or the 2018 cabinet created one.

Reading the buyback correctly

The complaint that Tabung Haji “failed to safeguard” the assets transferred to Urusharta Jamaah assumes those assets were healthy when they left Tabung Haji’s books, and that something went wrong in Urusharta Jamaah’s custody.

The buyback data suggests close to the reverse. The two assets that did come back were the ones that had visibly recovered – a plantation with stabilised cash flow and a land parcel sitting in a now-thriving development corridor.

Even then, Tabung Haji paid less for them than the price at which they were originally sold.

If the strongest performers in the Urusharta Jamaah pool are still changing hands below their 2018 valuation, the remaining assets – the ones not yet judged strong enough to reacquire – were very likely overvalued to begin with. Eight years of dedicated rehabilitation under a special purpose vehicle, and the bulk of the pool has still not earned its way back onto Tabung Haji’s books.

That is not evidence of Urusharta Jamaah mismanaging sound assets. It is evidence that the assets themselves were compromised well before Urusharta Jamaah ever took them on – a period that falls squarely within the tenure of Tabung Haji’s pre-2018 management.

Put simply, poor judgement and a poor risk appetite led Tabung Haji to buy ‘sick’ assets, dressed up by excellent marketing and analysis that sugarcoated the purchase.

Framed this way, the sukuk maturity that triggered this debate becomes less a story about custody and more a story about origination.

Malaysia’s discussion of Tabung Haji’s asset troubles has tended to focus on the 2018 rescue itself, treating it as the point where things went wrong.

The buyback numbers point further upstream, to the acquisitions that made the 2018 rescue necessary in the first place.

What the royal commission report confirms

This is precisely the territory the Royal Commission of Inquiry report on Tabung Haji has now covered.

What can now be said, on the strength of [the report and] the buyback figures in hand, is that the narrative of institutional failure needs redirecting.

The failure does not sit with Tabung Haji’s handling of the 2018 restructuring, nor with Urusharta Jamaah’s stewardship since. It sits earlier – in the decisions that filled Tabung Haji’s balance sheet with assets sick enough to need a RM19.9bn, 10-year rehabilitation programme in the first place.

Legally and commercially, the accountability for buying those ‘sick’ assets lies with the pre-2018 management, its board committees and ultimately Tabung Haji’s board.

The royal commission report has now put much of the root cause of Tabung Haji’s troubles on record. What remains to be seen is how the report is acted on.

Dr Mohamed Hadi Abd Hamid is a certified Sharia advisor and Islamic financial planner, and Dr Mohd Zaidi Md Zabri is a research fellow at the Centre for Islamic Economics, Faculty of Economics and Management Sciences, International Islamic University Malaysia.

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