This morning Leen called me from work to tell me someone from RHB had called H. It wasn’t someone from the head office, she said, but rather someone from RHB’s PJ Business Centre. He wants H to go to the bank on Friday for a face-to-face meeting with him and the repo man. She said yes, but then she had Leen call me to find out if that’s the bank’s big solution, sent down from the head office. In fact, she doesn’t want to have a meeting with the guy who carjacked her. He intimidated her that day; why should she be subjected to another meeting with him? I called Zaihan, the guy from RHB’s Corporate Comms, to see what’s going on; he was going to get back to me by today but a couple of hours ago he sent me an sms to inform me he still hadn’t heard anything from his bosses.

The bank’s attempt to quietly settle this at the branch level when it’s clearly gone beyond that reminds me of something that happened to Leen and me a few years back. Let me tell you a story.

It was early 2003 and a courier appeared at the door of the house we were staying in, government quarters in the health clinic compound in Tanjung Karang. After signing for the small package I opened it and was very surprised to see that it was a hire-purchase agreement from AM Bank. According to that document, Leen had just purchased a car, a Perodua Kembara. There was even a signature. But it wasn’t hers.

A few weeks before that, Leen had been approached by a lady we’ll call Cik Z, a sort of adopted daughter of Leen’s paternal grandfather. Cik Z lived in Tanjung Karang and wanted to buy a car for her son, who was about to go off to college, but she’d been blacklisted. Leen initially agreed to let Cik Z use her name to get a car, and was in the early stages of the process when she decided it was in fact a bad idea. I’m all for helping people we know, but we didn’t really know Cik Z; she had just sort of come out of nowhere, after decades of very little contact with the family. It didn’t help that Leen and I had just barely started our life together in Malaysia. We couldn’t afford to get screwed by someone.

Well, Cik Z went and screwed us anyway: Leen told her she was sorry but she couldn’t help her, and Cik Z went ahead and bought the car, putting an illegible scribble where Leen’s signature was supposed to be. We were surprised that she could have done that, but not just from a moral standpoint. How could a bank officer have accepted that signature? Shit, meet fan.

We made a police report and also went to see the manager of the local AM Bank branch, Mr. H. I can’t remember which came first, the meeting or the police report. Anyway, our meeting with Mr. H was frustrating, to say the least. We made it clear that a crime had taken place, and that the bank would need to take immediate, appropriate action. To us, that meant immediately removing Leen’s name from any association with the purchase, taking action against whichever bank officer had processed it, and taking legal action against Cik Z for fraud. But that wasn’t what Mr. H had in mind. None of it, in fact.

Mr. H pretty much brushed us off. Even if a crime had in fact taken place, he said, we were complicit, and so the best thing for us to do would be to just let it go and allow Cik Z to keep the car. Changing the loan from Leen’s name to that of Cik Z or her son would be a hassle, he said. He even called Cik Z in and attempted to get us to kiss and make up. Turned out they were friends. Tanjung Karang is a pretty small town. Cik Z, Mr. H and even the guy who had sold the car to Cik Z…they were all friends. After a very heated exchange that got us nowhere, we left.

Instead of going home to figure out what to do, we drove straight to KL, to the AM Bank headquarters on Jalan Yap Kwan Seng. There we talked to someone in the hire-purchase department, Mr. T. Ah, if only it was really Mr. T! “Ah pity da fool who try ta cheat ma customers!” he’d have said. No, this Mr. T was much smaller and wore a lot less jewelry, and didn’t even have a mohawk. He was angry, though…at least, he made it seem like he was. He expressed what seemed to be genuine concern over the details of our case, and even said action would be taken. We left there that day thinking justice would be served.

As far as we know, what the people at AM Bank HQ did was this: they simply transferred the loan from Leen to Cik Z. That’s right, Cik Z got to keep the car. The bank apparently thought it would be easier to do that than to get the car back and auction it off. As far as we know, she got to keep the car, and nothing was ever done to Mr. H or anyone else at the AM Bank branch in Tanjung Karang. As for the police report, well not only did it not lead to any charges, I don’t think it even led to an investigation. The people at AM Bank HQ apparently thought it was enough that Leen’s name had been removed from that particular loan agreement. We were definitely relieved to have her name cleared, but until now we feel justice was not served in that particular case.

In this current case, having our friend H sit down with the carjacker doesn’t sound like a very good solution, because it looks like the PJ Business Centre is trying to keep this local, and besides, as far as I know the repo man is still saying he gave the keys back to H. This issue can’t just go away. H is still afraid; Leen’s been traumatised as well. The people at RHB need to fix this. At this point I don’t know whether the offer to have a meeting was a branch-level initiative or actually the solution proposed by HQ. Whatever the case, I hope RHB Bank will truly accept responsibility for this and act accordingly.