KUCHING: Yayasan Sarawak director Azmi Bujang has promised that the huge increase of income from the timber industry will be used solely for education purposes.

As a tax free organisation, he said Yayasan Sarawak abides by the tax requirements and is not allowed to invest even though it anticipated to receive huge income with the implementation of new timber premium rate from July 1.

On the anticipated increase of income after implementation of the new rate of timber premium, Azmi said only with the approval of the Yayasan Sarawak Board, in which Chief Minister Datuk Amar Abang Johari Tun Openg sits as chairman, would he be able to reveal the projected amount.

Abang Johari made the decision to increase chargeable premium for hill timber log from the initial RM0.80 to RM50 per cubic metre from July this year.

He told the timber companies to accept the new premium rates on harvested logs or risk the loss of their timber concessions.

The current rate of Hill Timber Premium for all hill logs is RM0.80 per cubic metre and logs of hill species from agri-conversion areas is RM3.00 per cubic metre.

The premium collected goes to Sarawak Education Fund where Yayasan Sarawak is the secretariat.

The new timber policy would mean more than 6,000 per cent increase in education premium rate payable to Yayasan Sarawak.

“We must thank the Chief Minister, who is chairman of the Yayasan Sarawak Board, for taking such an initiative to assist Yayasan Sarawak in funding education programmes,” Azmi told The Borneo Post yesterday.

Azmi, however, pointed out that so far, he has yet to receive any notification on the new policy.

“We have yet to receive any notification on this new policy.  Whatever that I know, I learnt it from the newspapers,” he stressed.

Despite so, he assured that the huge income would not be used for any other purposes but education only.

“It would be a substantial amount which we can use to assist students. It will increase our capacity to help students. With more money, it means that more students will benefit from our education programmes. And with larger amount of money, comes bigger responsibility.

“We are now funding students to go to universities by offering loans and scholarship and to support our own universities including Swinburne University and Curtin University. We also have technical college such as Centexs (Centre of Technical Excellence) to support,” said Azmi.

He said apart from Centexs Kuching, two more Centexs would be coming up – one in Lundu and another in Lawas.

“For Lundu campus, landfill has been completed and design is now in the final stage. Construction will start next year. Similarly for Lawas campus, landfill is done and by early next year, construction will commence.”

The courses provided by Centexs will depend on the requests from industries such as the oil and gas industry.

“We cannot use the money (premium paid by timber companies) to buy new cars or build new buildings. If we were to do that, the money will be coming from our operating income.

“Anyway, we don’t need the building anymore, we have got this one – Wisma Adenan and we have enough staff. Everything is just nice for us to operate,” said Azmi.