JEDDAH: Malaysian Prime Minister Mohammed Najib Tun Razak has reiterated his country’s full and unflinching support for Saudi Arabia.

In an exclusive interview with Arab News at the opulent Qasr Al-Sharq hotel in Jeddah on Tuesday, he said the main purpose of his visit was to reaffirm the excellent state of bilateral relations between Saudi Arabia and Malaysia.

“And in particular to develop a very warm and close working relationship with Custodian of the Two Holy Mosque King Salman and with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Naif and Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman,” he said.

As part of the visit, Razak was the key guest at the opening of the Jeddah Economic Forum (JEF) along with Makkah Gov. Prince Khaled Al-Faisal on Tuesday night.

Talking about the theme of the JEF 2016, he said Malaysia has had more than two decades of solid experience in the concept of public-private partnership.

“We have been involved in public-private partnership for over 25 years now. We find that it is a very productive concept that allows the private sector to play a big part as the catalyst for economic development in the country,” he said.

According to him, public-private partnership minimizes the use of public funds. “It allow projects to be carried out which otherwise probably would not be implemented due to the constraints on public funding,” he said.

Razak admitted that they had made mistakes along the way.

“Yes, we have made some mistakes, but we believe that we have learned from them, and have much more reliable and robust public-private partnership models now than before.”

As Saudi Arabia embarks on implementing the concept in a big way as part of the National Transformation Program, the Malaysian prime minister has a word of advice.

“It is always better to have a bidding process, competitive bidding process,” he said. “Initially, we started on a first-come-first-served basis in which the private sector came up with a proposal and then that proposal was negotiated with them. We realized later that this first-come-first-serve process was not the best idea. It is better for the government to identify the opportunities and then open them up for bidding.”

To drive his point home, he said the benefit of a competitive bid was that “you are not tied to one particular proposal simply because they (the private sector) have identified the project earlier.”

He said he would like to see Saudi-Malaysia trade ties grow stronger.

“We understand the strong international headwinds. The level of bilateral trade between the two countries stands at $2.8 billion for 2015, but this is a decrease from the level of $4 billion in 2014; it is decrease of 16.4 percent. This is due to the economic headwinds and also because of the drop in oil prices. A huge chunk of our imports comprises crude petroleum and petroleum products. We want to take the relationship at a much higher level.”

— Full interview in tomorrow’s Arab News