An authoritarian order from Bank Negara to force all the country's banks, finance companies and merchant banks to merge into six big groups with the anchor bank and participating banks in each group selected by the authorities was nothing more than a shameless exercise to consolidate control of banking assets under UMNO. Greedy Finance Minister Daim Zainuddin would have been the major benefactor of this exercise with his tiny Multi-Purpose Bank swallowing up institutions much bigger than itself including RHB Bank which alone is 8 times bigger. Thankfully it was called off by Mahathir who had to woo Chinese support for the coming election. Chinese would have been the biggest losers if the bank mergers had gone through.