exclusive The following is the final part of Dr Mahathir Mohamad's Q&A session with a group of Malay professionals in a close-door talk organised by think-tank Institute of Economic and Political Studies.

Given the circumstances surrounding Proton now, what are your feelings?

MAS CEO (chief executive officer) has gone, he has retired. But Proton's case is unique. They sack people who are successful. Now I'm beginning to question whether what (former Proton CEO) Tengku Mahaleel (Tengku Ariff) has been telling me is the truth or not. He told me that it (Proton) makes so much money that it has billions of dollars and that when he built a plant in Tanjung Malim, he didn't have to borrow money either from the government or from the bank. He used internal resources. But now I'm beginning to ask myself whether he has been telling me the truth or not, because now it has been losing money.

Now, how do you lose money? It must be because you're selling the car at below cost or something like that, or because of one reason or another your operation cost has gone up, or something like that. I'm not able to say, but certainly a little bit surprised that a company which had so much cash, which apparently had been doing well, suddenly reports that it has not been doing well and one of the reasons is that it has bought Augusta, an Italian motorcycle-maker and it seems that by buying Augusta it lost money.