PETALING JAYA, July 13 — Defence Minister Datuk Seri Mohamad Hasan today said that an official announcement for news on Boustead Naval Shipyard Sdn Bhd (BNS) going private will be made soon.

"Keep your ears open,” the politician who is also popularly known as Tok Mat told reporters at a press conference in The Bousteador.

He also said that BNS has been transferred to the special purpose vehicle (SPV) owned by the Ministry of Finance (MoF).

"It is done already,” he said.

In May, Bernama reported him as saying that MoF has established an SPV for the purpose of taking over BNS as a subsidiary, which will be monitored by the Project Monitoring Committee (PMC) jointly chaired by the Treasury secretary-general and his ministry’s secretary-general.

The day after this announcement, Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim, who is also the finance minister, said the government had "no choice” but to take over BNS in order to complete the controversial littoral combat ships (LCS) project as the troubled company had failed to deliver.

Anwar was reported saying the alternative would be to see the billions of ringgit already paid out for the crucial defence project amount to nothing.

In 2011, BNS won an RM9 billion contract to provide six LCS to the Royal Malaysian Navy, which were initially meant to be delivered starting in 2019.

In 2018, the short-lived Pakatan Harapan government formed a special committee to investigate the contract, which eventually discovered that over RM6 billion had already been paid out from the total contract amount even before a single vessel was delivered.

A forensic audit was also commissioned the same year on Boustead Heavy Industries Corporation Bhd (BHIC), the parent of BNS, which eventually led to criminal breach-of-trust charges against former BNS managing director, Tan Sri Ahmad Ramli Mohd Nor, last year.