THE NAME WAS THE PRODUCT

You were never supposed to know his name. *unless you were one of the top people in the system.

That was the point. The system was designed so you would never need to. You put your money into a shariah-compliant fund, a unit trust, an Islamic investment product, and somewhere in the architecture of that product, someone had checked. Someone with the right title, the right authority, the right religious standing had looked at it and decided it was sound. You trusted the label. The label had a name behind it. You just never needed to know whose.
That name was Daud Bakar.

He was Chairman of Bank Negara’s Shariah Advisory Council. The body whose rulings determine what is and is not permissible in every Islamic banking and finance product in Malaysia. He was simultaneously Chairman of the Securities Commission’s Shariah Advisory Council. He sat on the Shariah board of Permodalan Nasional Berhad, the institution that manages the savings of millions of ordinary Malaysians through ASB and its family of funds. His firm Amanie Advisors acted as Shariah adviser to over one hundred active funds. His name appeared on advisory boards across Morgan Stanley, BNP Paribas, Amundi, and Natixis. In 2022 the Yang di-Pertuan Agong presented him with the Royal Award for Islamic Finance at a ceremony attended by the Governor of Bank Negara and the Chairman of the Securities Commission.

Every ringgit you placed into a shariah-compliant product in Malaysia over the past two decades was placed, in part, on the authority of names like his. Not because you knew him. Because the institutions you trusted knew him, and they kept putting him at the top of everything.

On 11 May 2026, that name was charged with seven counts of criminal breach of trust under Section 409 of the Penal Code. RM10.55 million. Money allegedly entrusted to him for a shariah-compliant business that the prosecution says received something else instead. Section 409 is the heaviest category of criminal breach of trust in Malaysian law. It exists specifically for cases where the accused held a position of professional or fiduciary responsibility. The minimum sentence upon conviction is two years. The maximum is twenty. This followed a separate charge in February 2026 for trading securities without a Capital Market Services Licence. He has claimed trial to all charges. The court will decide guilt.
But the court cannot decide the other question. The question of how this happened.

To answer that, you need to understand what Malaysia’s Islamic finance industry actually was before it was an industry. It was a state project. Bank Negara built INCEIF in 2005 to produce the human capital a sector needed before that sector fully existed. The Malaysia International Islamic Financial Centre was launched to signal global ambition. The Shariah Advisory Councils at BNM and the SC were constructed to provide the regulatory credibility that international institutions expected. The architecture came first. The verified expertise was supposed to follow.

It did not always follow. What followed instead was the performance of expertise. The conference circuit. The award ceremony. The advisory board appointment that led to the next advisory board appointment. The title that made the next title easier to obtain. No papers required. No measurable output demanded. The name was the credential. The appointment was the proof. And the label of shariah compliance made the whole structure almost impossible to question, because scrutinising the scholar felt impolite and probing the appointment felt almost un-islamic.

This is not only a story about Islamic finance. It is a story about what Malaysia does with names it has decided to trust.

Vivy Yusof was a different kind of name. Not a scholar. Not a regulator. A brand built on aspiration, relatability, and the specific trust that Malaysian audiences extend to someone who appears to have built something real. FashionValet was not just a company. It was a story. And that story was compelling enough that Khazanah Nasional and Permodalan Nasional Berhad invested a combined RM47 million of public money into it in 2018.

Khazanah manages Malaysia’s strategic investments. PNB manages the savings of ordinary Malaysians. Between them they invested RM47 million into a fashion e-commerce platform because the brand behind it felt like a sure thing. The question that should have been asked, and apparently was not asked with sufficient rigour, was whether the story was the same thing as the business. It was not. The institutions sold their stakes in 2023 for RM3.1 million. The combined loss was RM43.9 million. In December 2024, Vivy and her husband were charged under the same Section 409 with allegedly transferring RM8 million from FashionValet’s account to a company they personally owned, without board approval. They have claimed trial. The court will decide.

Your ASB dividends. Your unit trust returns. Your EPF-linked investments. These are not abstract numbers. They are the accumulated savings of people who worked for them and trusted the institutions managing them to ask the right questions before committing them. Those institutions saw a name. They saw a brand. They appear to have treated the name as sufficient due diligence.

Two different names. Two different sectors. Two different courts. The same accountability failure underneath both.

Malaysia’s institutional culture has a specific mechanism for manufacturing trust without scrutiny. Visibility gets mistaken for competence. Proximity to the right people gets treated as proof of capability. The award, the title, the television appearance, the social media following: these are not incidental features of Malaysian public life. They are the pathways through which names get elevated to positions of institutional trust, and through which public money follows them without the rigour that public money demands.

The institutions that should apply that scrutiny have their own incentives not to. A regulatory council that appoints a name endorses it. A sovereign wealth fund that invests in a brand validates it. When the name collapses, the institution that endorsed it has every reason to call it an individual failure. Two bad actors. Two isolated cases. Nothing structural to examine.

That framing is already being prepared. It is wrong.

The structure that produced both names is intact. The appointment mechanisms are unchanged. The award circuits are still running. The sovereign wealth funds are still making decisions about which brands deserve public money. Nobody has announced a review of how names get elevated to positions of institutional trust in Malaysia. Nobody has asked whether the concentration of advisory positions in a single individual represents a governance risk. Nobody has examined what due diligence Khazanah and PNB apply before committing hundreds of millions in public savings to a personal brand.

The spiritual promise of shariah compliance was that someone was watching. The financial promise of Khazanah and PNB was that someone was checking. Both promises rested on names. Both names are now in court.
The system that made those promises is still making them.

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