Aminul Islam Abdul Nor has been photographed with ministers and royalty, and his name has graced corporate pages in reports involving multinational deals worth hundreds of millions of ringgit.

But to the larger Malaysian public, how the Bestinet founder became a lynchpin in the lucrative migrant worker business is somewhat mysterious.

Bestinet is the company behind the Foreign Worker Central Management System (FWCMS), a system used by the government to process the hundreds of thousands of migrant workers arriving in Malaysia yearly.

Even before FWCMS issues hit headlines...