Finding Sulu's lost sultans

LAHAD DATU, SABAH – Nothing about the crossing was immediately unusual. For centuries, people traveled the 200 kilometers of water between here and Tawi-Tawi, the Philippines’ southernmost province, to sell wares or purchase goods.

But in the dead of night 10 years ago, two motorboats crossed over into neighboring Malaysia and landed on Sabah, carrying around 200 elderly men, a dozen World War II rifles and their leader, a 72-year-old prince. 

The prince, Agbimuddin Kiram, wanted to occupy the northern tip of Borneo on behalf of his older brother Jamalul Kiram III, a claimant to the former Sultanate of Sulu. His elderly band called themselves the Royal Sultanate Force, a mere shadow of an age when the Tausugs of Sulu were feared warriors.

Relatives say Agbimuddin’s last-ditch effort to reunify the lost realm of his ancestors was driven by his impending mortality. 

“They just wanted to experience being in their territory. Agbimuddin asked three times for permission from my father to go to Sabah. Finally, he went without permission,” his niece Jacel Kiram, daughter of Jamalul III, told Nikkei Asia. 

His daughter claims he was surprised by Agbimuddin’s actions, but nearly a month into the standoff, Jamalul III had decided to stand by his brother. Agbimuddin and his men would “fight until the last man” to “reclaim and settle peacefully in our homeland,” Jamalul III said in a 2013 statement delivered by Jacel.

By mid-March, through airstrikes and house-to-house manhunts, Malaysia had recaptured Tanduo and killed 56 of the raggedy band they referred to as "terrorists" after ambushes and shootouts by the invaders felled nine Malaysian officers and six civilians.

Dozens of Filipinos were charged in Malaysian courts, while the rest fled with their leader, back to Tawi-Tawi, where Agbimuddin died two years later. 

The consequences, however, have since reverberated further than Sabah’s shores. Najib Razak, then prime minister of Malaysia, apparently saw the failed invasion as a violation of a centuries-old contract with the sultanate for the lease of Sabah, signed by British explorers in 1878 and inherited by Malaysia.

For years, eight of Agbimuddin’s relatives had quietly received from Malaysia a yearly payment of 5,300 ringgit (now $1,140) for the rights to Sabah. It was a token sum for a land whose mineral wealth would later turn out to be considerable after oil was discovered in 1910. 

Almost immediately after Agbimuddin’s invasion, Najib ceased those payments.

The Kiram family – the hereditary rulers of the now defunct sultanate – has since taken Malaysia, a sovereign state, to courts across Europe for the unpaid lease, providing a unifying cause to cousins long torn apart by questions as fundamental as who the rightful sultan is. 

Through arbitration proceedings launched in 2019, their commercial claim on Sabah has ballooned to an astonishing $15 billion. The sum, awarded by a Spanish arbitrator in France in 2022, reflected the value of oil, gas and palm oil that Malaysia extracts from Sabah, its second largest state. 

Facing one of the largest arbitral awards in history, Malaysia has begun a lengthy appeals process in European courts. Meanwhile, lawyers for the family have launched enforcement claims in jurisdictions where Malaysia holds assets, including Luxembourg and France. 

The claim holds that Malaysia violated the contract for the lease of Sabah when it stopped paying the rent, and secondly, that the contract should have been renegotiated after oil and gas were discovered.

As colonial lines were redrawn, North Borneo became a British protectorate, then joined an independent Malaysia in 1963 as the state of Sabah. Over the past five decades, Sabah has produced 1.92 billion barrels of oil, a fifth of all oil production for Malaysia and its oil and gas company Petronas.

The ripples of Agbimuddin’s failed invasion highlight the unresolved legacy of colonialism in this corner of the South China Sea, where the borders of modern states were carved across preexisting nations, cultures and identities. 

The financial stakes are high, with the award of $15 billion equal to nearly a fifth of Malaysia’s budget this year. It is also an unimaginable sum for the Kirams of Sulu, one of the Philippines’ poorest and least developed provinces, scarred by decades of separatist insurgency. Members of the family see the award – or a settlement with Malaysia – as a potential resource for the newly autonomous Muslim region in Mindanao. 

“We fear dying and leaving this situation for our children,” Muedzul Lail Tan Kiram, the reigning sultan in Sulu, told Nikkei Asia of his family’s claim to Sabah. “Let’s think of a solution now.”

If the award is ever paid, the windfall could transform the fortunes of the now-impoverished dynasty. At its height in 1836, Sulu stretched from Palawan to Zamboanga, Jolo and Tawi-Tawi in the southern Philippines.

Sultan Jamalul II, the last Sulu monarch to be recognized by the Philippines and who died in 1936, stood at the head of a population estimated to be 500,000. 

Even at its twilight, the sultanate hosted dignitaries such as William Howard Taft, who served as governor-general when the Philippines was a U.S. territory. 

Alice Roosevelt Longworth, who landed on Jolo island in 1905 with Taft and a delegation from her father, U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, wrote in her diary of the Muslim tribes she met:

“There were thousands of Moros from the neighboring islands as well as from Jolo. The palms and the ocean were like a drop scene. One felt as though a highly colored stage setting had suddenly become real.” 

Alice received a pearl ring and a marriage proposal from Jamalul II, great-uncle to Muedzul and Jamalul III. His datus, or chieftains, wore silk turbans and shirts fastened with bejeweled gold pins and presented her with jewels and textiles, she wrote.

Today, the glory has faded. The sultanate’s ancestral house, Astana Darul Jambangan, sits on a hill in the center of Jolo, the main island of Sulu province.

The island’s pink sand beaches and clear waters are unspoiled by development and tourism, perhaps because of its unfortunate history with violent extremists.

Now mostly defeated, the Abu Sayyaf group besieged the southern Philippines beginning in 1989, using Jolo as a base to conduct kidnappings and execute Filipino and foreign hostages.

What remains of the palace walls are two stone pillars, so gnarled and weather-beaten that they blend into the surrounding trees. The three-story wooden structure was said to be the largest royal house in the Philippines but was destroyed by a typhoon in 1932. 

Four years later when Jamalul II died, an obituary in Time Magazine mentioned an annual rent of $5,000 paid by the British North Borneo Company, then a princely sum. Childless, he left his estate to eight nieces and nephews as well as his sister-in-law but did not appoint a successor – starting a succession feud that continues three generations later.

One of the claimants to the throne is Sultan Muedzul, who lives in a yellow bungalow on Jolo island with his wife and seven children.

Their community is gated but not grand, far removed from his charmed childhood as Sultan Esmail’s grandson, then as Sultan Mahakuttah’s heir.

There were mansions and royal audiences and private planes to Manila, where Esmail and Mahakuttah would meet with Presidents Diosdado Macapagal and Ferdinand Marcos to discuss the Sabah claim. 

Now 57, clad in a black thobe and clean-shaven except for a graying goatee, Muedzul traces the evaporation of his power and properties from Mahakuttah’s early death, when Muedzul was only 8 years old. 

“My older cousins took advantage of my youth,” he told Nikkei Asia. "The only property that was left to me were the ruins of the royal palace." 

Muedzul’s cut of the annual rental payment for Sabah – which he received annually until the 2013 standoff – was a meager 200 pesos ($3.63) that grew to 1,200 pesos as older relatives died. His uncle Fuad Kiram is named in the arbitration as their clan’s administrator. 

The dividends were so negligible that some branches of the family, such as the wealthy Rasuls of Tawi-Tawi, declined their annual payments before 2013. Their illustrious clan includes Santanina Rasul, a Philippine senator from 1987 to 1995, and her husband, Abraham Rasul, a former ambassador.

“It was 70,000 pesos a year,” Salma Pir Rasul, daughter of the late Santanina and Abraham, said about the lease payment. “It followed literally the terms of the lease, which was centuries old. They didn’t even raise it to the present value. That’s even less than the rent for an apartment in Manila.”

Court documents describe the claimants “in a position of hardship” compared to the billions of dollars in hydrocarbon and palm oil revenue that Malaysia reaps from Sabah each year. 

Most of the family live as ordinary middle-class citizens, including the eight named claimants who descend from Jamalul II’s nine original heirs. The 74-year-old Taj Mahal Kiram-Tarsum Nuqui, who administers two large portions of the will, was the first female Muslim officer in the Philippine armed forces, retiring from the Air Force in 1998.

The other administrators are retirees, microbusiness owners or civil servants in their 50s to 70s. The youngest is Sheramar Kiram, daughter of Jamalul III and half-sister of Jacel. Ahmad Sampang died in May, leaving his brother Widz Raunda Sampang with a combined 8.32% share. 

For years, the family complained of the missing payments from Malaysia to anyone who would listen.

Finally, their tale reached the right ears: an oil and gas executive who had served as an expert witness in a case litigated by the British barrister and international arbitration specialist Paul Cohen. 

The executive connected the family to Cohen, who describes himself as a “quasi academic” before a legal career counseling governments and private parties in arbitrations involving energy, bribery, fraud and intellectual property. 

An academic background in history, he says, differentiated his approach from previous unsuccessful attempts to bring the Kirams’ claim to court. The Sabah claim was an intriguing historical quandary, one that piqued his interest until he could find a legal angle, he said. 

“Nothing about this case is normal,” Cohen told Nikkei Asia from London.

But, he added, “this is a modern commercial arbitration. You just have to get over the initial bizarreness.” 

On and off for a year, Cohen pored over family documents and archives in London before he found a cold legal basis for a commercial suit: Malaysia’s nonpayment had breached the British North Borneo Company’s contract with Jamalul II, which merited renegotiating after the discovery of oil and gas in Sabah.

“What clinched it for me was the clients told me they received checks from the Malaysian government,” said Cohen. Checks from 2011 signed by the Malaysian ambassador in Manila were submitted as evidence to the arbitrator when Malaysia denied knowledge of the heirs’ identities. 

Cohen traveled to the Philippines in 2015 for his first meeting with the eight administrators, where it was immediately clear that the family did not have the means to pursue the claim. The London-based litigation funder Therium has bankrolled the Kirams’ case, the Financial Times has reported. Cohen’s team declined to comment on their financial backers.

Third-party financing has become increasingly common in such arbitration proceedings, said Harald Sippel, a Kuala Lumpur-based lawyer who has worked on over 80 arbitrations, adding that it allows claimants to pursue cases they would not otherwise be able to. "Funders want appropriate returns, so they would never finance a claim that doesn’t have a very good chance of success,” he said.

If the heirs ever see a payday from Malaysia, financial backers would get a substantial cut greater than the tens of millions of pounds spent so far. Therium did not respond to Nikkei Asia's request for comment.

Initially skeptical of another failed approach, the administrators were “emotional” upon learning that Cohen could take their claim to European courts.

The elders delivered the news to the family soon afterward. “Let’s focus on winning the case. If we win, then we can continue the argument over who the rightful sultan is,” they told the contending branches.

Lawyers for the Sulu heirs initially brought the claim to a Spanish court because the contract was signed on Jolo island, when the Philippines was under Spanish rule. The contract named the British consul-general in Sabah as the arbiter, but the present-day British government declined to adjudicate. A Spanish court accepted the claim and appointed Gonzalo Stampa as arbiter.

With Malaysia pressing Spain to dismiss the claim, however, the claimants applied to move the venue to France, where the final award was ultimately issued.

The first summons, in 2019, from Stampa came as a shock to Tommy Thomas, whose tenure as Malaysian attorney general was already off to a rough start. His appointment in 2018 by Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed was opposed by the Malay political establishment who disapproved of Thomas, an Indian Christian from Kuala Lumpur. 

“I never expected to deal with any Filipino or other interest in, or claim to Sabah or its resources during my time in office. Hence the total surprise when I was briefed sometime in 2019 of a separate and independent claim by private individuals, all of whom claimed to be descendants of the Sultan of Sulu, for annual compensation,” Thomas wrote in his 2021 memoir. 

He recalled that 1963 was the first time he had heard of the Sulu claim to Sabah, as the Philippines had opposed the inclusion of North Borneo in an independent Malaysia. 

“Malaysian officialdom and common folk thought of it as a historical quirk that was settled matter from the formation of Malaysia,” said Oh Ei Sun, an international legal scholar and a former political secretary to Prime Minister Najib, Mahathir’s predecessor. 

Thomas was advised that it would be “perilous” to ignore the summons because Malaysia had signed an international treaty to enforce commercial arbitration awards. If arbitrators awarded damages to the claimants, Malaysian assets in any member country could be seized. 

Malaysia sent representatives to arbitration proceedings in Spain for three weeks in 2019, then ceased participating entirely. Spanish arbitrator Stampa continued adjudicating despite Malaysia’s absence.

In February 2022, Stampa ruled in the Kirams’ favor with the award of $14.9 billion, dwarfed only by the $50 billion awarded to former shareholders of Yukos, the oil and gas company seized by Russian authorities during 2004-2007. That award was overturned in 2021 by the Dutch supreme court. 

Kuala Lumpur’s political class views the Sulu heirs’ lawyers in London with suspicion for litigating against Malaysia in European courts, seeing it as a case of former colonial powers eager to redress imperialist wrongs — at their country’s expense.

“Suing a country is a big-league game," Oh said. "Sovereign immunity is held to be sacrosanct. Once invoked, all states defer to that. A private party wouldn’t be able to come into court at all."

Malaysia argues that the contract between the sultan and the British company was not a lease but a cession of rights to Sabah. The sultan and British company’s authority was subsumed by the Philippines and Malaysia when Sulu became part of the former and Sabah of the latter. Any arbitration, therefore, should be between the governments in Manila and Kuala Lumpur, and any remaining rights of the family were voided when Agbimuddin Kiram invaded Lahad Datu.

But the case was brought as a commercial claim for an unpaid lease by Cohen, similar to companies bringing claims against governments that nationalize private assets.

This March, bailiffs in France tried to enforce the award by attempting to seize three properties belonging to the Malaysian government. However, Malaysia inched ahead in June when appeals courts in Paris and the Hague rejected the authority of arbitrator Stampa and denied the award’s enforcement in France and the Netherlands, where Petronas holds some overseas assets. 

Malaysian Law Minister Azalina Othman Said hailed the ruling as “a decisive victory in Malaysia’s ongoing pursuit of legal remedies, which Malaysia is confident will result in comprehensive defeat for the claimants and their funders.”

But the case is not over. The Paris appeals court ruling appeared favorable to Malaysia but maintained that the contract was a lease that had an arbitration clause, keeping legal avenues open for the heirs. “The claimants will carefully review the decision and are considering their options before the French Supreme Court,” lawyers for the Sulu heirs said in a statement. 

Experts say the claim is unlikely to go away soon. "Given the large amounts at stake, I would assume that the claimants will continue to attempt enforcement proceedings for years to come," said Sippel, the Kuala Lumpur lawyer. "They have spent millions on legal fees and can hardly afford walking away from this now. Malaysia would then have to oppose these enforcement proceedings as they occur," he said.

Manila, for its part, has officially stayed out of the commercial arbitration despite calls from politicians to press the sovereign claim. Philippine public opinion occasionally swings around to support the claim, despite a complicated history between the sultan’s heirs and Manila. The Philippines, a republic, is prohibited from recognizing any monarchical lines. 

Politically charged coverage of the arbitration by the Malaysian and Filipino press has fanned nationalist flames. Coverage escalated in recent months as Law Minister Azalina waged a public relations campaign against the arbitration on behalf of Anwar Ibrahim’s new government. 

Some Malaysian officials would rather not settle the arbitration, claiming it would not end the Sulu issue given the Kiram family’s own disagreements about the rightful sultan. 

Jacel Kiram, daughter of the late Jamalul III, hoped Malaysia would agree to share Sabah and help develop Sulu as neighbors and fellow Muslims.

“We shouldn’t be fighting,” she told Nikkei Asia. "There’s a way to let both parties shout that they won’t give up sovereignty while reaching a mutually beneficial agreement." 

Princess Jacel lives in Davao with her husband, a high-ranking army intelligence officer. Lawyers for her relatives say Jacel does not speak for them, but the 40-year-old mother of five has acted as her clan’s self-proclaimed spokesperson since her uncle’s failed invasion of Sabah thrust her into the spotlight. 

“My world shrank when Lahad Datu happened,” Jacel said. “I didn’t want this.” 

Wearing a black hijab and light-colored shirt and trousers, Jacel spoke to Nikkei Asia in the Davao City high-rise where she runs the Philippines’ governing body for silat, a Malay martial art, as part of her efforts to preserve Sulu and Tausug culture.

“When you think about Sulu, you think about Abu Sayyaf and beheadings. You don’t think about the contributions to Philippine history,” she said. 

Despite her title and royal lineage, Jacel is the product of a middle-class upbringing in Manila, where her father, Jamalul III, tried his hand at business. “He promised himself he would work it out for the people of Sulu, then return home once he had become rich,” she said. 

Styling himself sultan, Jamalul was courted by politicians in Manila seeking to leverage his name to win votes in Mindanao. Like her father, Jacel in 2016 ran unsuccessfully for the Senate with the party of Vice President Jejomar Binay. She had slim chances of winning a national seat, but Binay said he wanted her on his slate to raise awareness of the Philippines’ claim to Sabah. 

Because they lived in Manila, Jacel’s branch had closer ties to the national government than others with competing claims to the sultanate. Her line maintains that the title passes to the oldest surviving male in the family, not the firstborn son — a key point of contention among the family branches.

“If a Sultan is survived by a brother and a son, it goes first to the brother before the son,” Jacel said, defending the claim of her uncle Phugdalun. 

Muedzul, whose claim depends on the primacy of sons over brothers, disputes this. 

“I can’t blame her because that’s what she was raised to believe. Their grandfather Punjungan planted the idea,” Muedzul said of Jacel’s claim.

Muedzul’s grandfather, Sultan Esmail, was older brother to Jacel’s grandfather Punjungan. Their father, Mawallil Wasit, succeeded his own brother Jamalul II, the childless sultan who died in 1936. 

When Mawallil Wasit died suddenly from heart disease and was succeeded by Esmail, Punjungan moved his family to Sabah and espoused a rival claim. Esmail reigned on Jolo island and was succeeded by his eldest son, Mahakuttah, Muedzul’s father.

Muedzul has not left Jolo since the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. For security reasons, he and his relatives named in the arbitration are unlikely to travel as long as legal proceedings in Europe are ongoing. He complains of weight gain from staying indoors at the request of the local Philippine military chief. 

"My situation is now like house arrest," Muedzul said. Local authorities would prefer round-the-clock security, but the cash-strapped sultan can hardly afford food and cigarettes for his guards. Ten soldiers accompany him when he travels to his farm in Maimbung, outside Jolo City, and his younger children are escorted to school by security.

Muedzul's eldest son and crown prince is 22, old enough to succeed him when the time comes.

Through their representatives and in interviews with Nikkei Asia, members of the family said they plan to use the award to develop Sulu, improve roads, build schools and hospitals, and provide scholarships. Malaysia could even recast itself as an investor in Mindanao, they said.

Malaysia would want the Philippine government involved to guarantee a final settlement. "If it's a settlement, it must be a one-and-done settlement," Oh said. "No more claims, no more annual payments."

But, he added: "The Philippine government is not eager to settle this. No country would want to relinquish their claim to such a big piece of land."

Seeing Sabah as part of its territory, the Philippines has no permanent diplomatic presence in the state, leaving hundreds of thousands of migrant Filipinos without representation.

Ingal, a Jolo native in his 60s, came to Lahad Datu in 1984. Without Malaysian birth certificates or identification cards, none of his 10 children were educated. He works as a fishmonger in the town market with his second son and rarely takes the 45-minute boat trip to visit Jolo.

"Over there, there's too much police. Here, it's peaceful," Ingal told Nikkei Asia.

The only time Ingal remembers strife in Lahad Datu was when Agbimuddin's troops landed in 2013. Malaysian officials buried the felled invaders according to Muslim rites but avoided laying them to rest in one place lest it became a monument for sympathizers. Their graves are scattered across Sabah.

"We only realized Agbimuddin had escaped because he was not among the arrested and his body was not among the corpses," said Hamzah Taib, former police commissioner of Sabah. Lahad Datu was one of his final operations in a 41-year career with the Malaysian police. Ten years later, the loss of young officers in the standoff still causes him pain.

Agbimuddin died in Tawi-Tawi less than two years after the Lahad Datu invasion, the only time that his family confirmed he had made it back to the Philippines. Ill with diabetes, he had asked Hamzah's negotiators for food and medicine.

"I pitied him. He didn't look like a rajah," Hamzah told Nikkei.

The standoff was merely a blip in normal relations between Malaysia and the Philippines. This March, Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim and President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. agreed to pursue "in-depth talks" between their foreign ministers to resolve the Sabah claim.

The family's elders are less optimistic.

"Not in our lifetime," Rasul said. "There are a lot of spurious claimants coming out. It's going to be long and protracted."

Additional reporting by Nickee Butlangan, Hakimie Amrie and Rhyannon Bartlett-Imadegawa.

^{Editors: Charles Clover, Alice French
Photo and video editing: Hiroki Endo
Graphics: MinJung Kim, Michael Tsang, Hidechika Nishijima, Naomi Hakusui
Copy editor: John Geis}