By P. Gunasegaram
With Mavcom out of the way, diddled flyers can expect little from airlines
The dissolution of the Malaysian Aviation Commission or Mavcom on August 1 made protection for flyers, already poor, even worse. For millions of them up to RM3 billion in fares for unflown flights may never be recovered.
Mavcom, which was formed specifically to address economic and commercial matters involving airlines, including consumer protection, no longer exists, the authorities acceding to the requests of airline operators such as AirAsia.
In 2019, AirAsia Group Bhd group chief executive officer then Tony Fernandes claimed that Mavcom had failed the country’s aviation sector saying it lacked proper understanding of low-cost airlines.
However, then Mavcom executive chairman Dr Nungsari Radhi responded that its role was to ensure its work benefits the industry overall and not any one specific player. “There are many stakeholders in the aviation industry in Malaysia, not merely one. We have consciously worked towards that objective and will continue to do so”.
There serious consumer-related issues left unresolved. Mavcom was set up on March 1, 2016, under the Malaysian Aviation Commission Act 2015 to regulate economic and commercial matters, including consumer protection, related to civil aviation in Malaysia.
Reporting to Parliament
Tellingly it reported directly to Parliament, giving it some semblance of independence, objectivity and impartiality. Not everyone wanted that.
Effective 1 August 2025, the Civil Aviation Authority of Malaysia or CAAM, which reports to the Transport Minister, currently Anthony Loke, assumed full responsibility for all regulatory functions within the civil aviation industry.
Among the many issues that Mavcom handled was the problem of customer refunds when airlines cancelled some RM3 billion in ticket bookings following the Covid outbreak of 2019-2020 which have not been refunded even after the airlines recovered.
I wrote a comment on this titled “How airlines are diddling customers of billions”.
Further an AirAsia associate, AirAsia X, in a restructuring exercise to get debt write-offs, classified advance payments for tickets as debt, resulting in an effective write-off of some RM1.4 billion owed to ticket purchasers, which I explained in an article titled “Why AirAsia and AAX customers are not creditors”.
Customers became creditors
Mavcom said in a statement then “that air travel consumers ought not to be classified as ‘creditors’ as the air travel consumers did not, inter alia, sell any products, provide services, or make loans to AAX, but instead have paid monies for the purchase of tickets in advance of their flights. Accordingly, Mavcom reiterates its position that AAX should reimburse air travel consumers for the tickets purchased”.
But there was no follow through to make AAX pay or even give replacement tickets and customers lost their money.
Transport minister. Loke was often criticised for being too close to some airlines, in particular AirAsia, prompting opposition MP Wee Ka Siong to ask if he was AirAsia’s sales person when Loke launched their cheap flight marketing campaign for the Chinese New Year holidays in 2019.
Now with Mavcom out of the way, and CAAM taking over their functions, one can expect that the situation will become even worse for flyers who have their flights cancelled during Covid and who have ongoing problems with airlines.
One thing for sure, airline owners and operators like Tony Fernandes have demonstrated their ability to cosy up to politicians to get things done in their favour. Lest memory fails us, let’s take you back to 2018.
We saw Fernandes travelling with Najib Razak on an AirAsia plane done up in BN livery on a return trip to Kuala Lumpur after campaigning in Kota Kinabalu in 2018 . They both heartily endorsed each other after the flight, where they sat side-by-side.I wrote an article about this titled “AirAsia’s dubious support for BN.”
Fernandes did not want Mavcom and he got his wish.
Will CAAM do a great job instead? Unlikely in terms of consumer protection. I looked for the statement where Mavcom said AirAsia and AirAsia X were not creditors. I got this message: “Effective 1 August 2025, all functions and responsibilities previously managed by the Malaysian Aviation Commission (MAVCOM) have been fully assumed by the Civil Aviation Authority of Malaysia (CAAM)”. There was no new link to that article.
It’s like Mavcom never existed and all the previous announcements have been wiped clean. We all know to whose benefit it is – the airlines which consumers complained about. Why kill an independent commission which had its functions and then not even have continuity for its previous work?
As we mourn the demise of Mavcom, a potential thorn in the side of AirAsia and AAX, and its functions, including consumer protection, taken over by a sycophantic CAAM which reports to Loke, we mourn too the death of reformasi within Harapan.
It’s back to BN/Umno style politics and the winners are those who can get political clout to get their way – nothing much has changed . Signs are things will get worse as they are emboldened, encouraged by lack of accountability.
P Gunasegaram says how things change but then they don’t.
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