Gadang buys 10% stake in little-known DWL

DWL now has two new major shareholders. One is Wan Khalik Wan Muhammad(file pic) who bought a 10% stake in January when he bought 19.86 million shares via his private investment vehicle Total Sejati Sdn Bhd.

PETALING JAYA: Gadang Holdings Bhd has purchased a 10% stake in little known DWL Resources Bhd in a move the former says, “is to build and strengthen the business relationship between the two companies.”

Major construction outfit Gadang, which has a market capitalisation of close to RM560mil, said it paid RM18mil in cash for the purchase of 20 million shares in DWL at 90 sen a share. The trade was done via an off market transaction.

It isn’t clear who sold the shares to Gadang.

The move puts the spotlight again on DWL, which was formerly known as Spring Gallery Bhd.

Its shares have shot up in recent weeks although its share price remains relatively volatile due to its thin shareholding.

On April 18, 2019, a unit of Gadang had entered into a pre-bid consortium with a unit of DWL to work with each other to bid for infrastructure projects.

The companies have since said that they will jointly undertake a contract for such infrastructure works if their bids are successful.

Although speculation is rife that the projects include the recently revived East Coast Rail Link (ECRL), Gadang has clarified that it has yet to submit any bids for the project.

However, on April 19, DWL appointed former Prasarana chief executive Datuk Shahril Mokhtar as the managing director of DWL which added weight to the ECRL speculation.

DWL had said that Shahril “will play an integral role in bringing the group to the next level particularly in the infrastructure sector”.

DWL now has two new major shareholders. One is Wan Khalik Wan Muhammad who bought a 10% stake in January when he bought 19.86 million shares via his private investment vehicle Total Sejati Sdn Bhd. Wan Khalik is now executive chairman of DWL and has Sarawak connections due to his past role as principal private secretary to the Chief Minister of Sarawak from 2013 until July 2018.

The company’s other new shareholder is Datuk Seri Mohd Aminul Islam Abdul Nor, who is well-known in the corporate circle as being the owner of the concessionaire that manages the foreign worker centralised management system.

Mohd Aminul surfaced in the company on April 12 with a 30% stake, making him the single largest shareholder.

His entry came after he acquired all the shares in Greenfield Hills Sdn Bhd – the holding company that owns 59.65 million shares in DWL.

Market talk is that Mohd Aminul may be exploring injecting his foreign worker centralised management system (FWCMS), said to be a profitable business with high margins, into DWL. It is said that the FWCMS is based on a government concession and that annual revenues to the concessionaire is around the RM200mil mark.