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A key player in Sikh separatism By Kim Bolan
The 53-year-old businessman and father of five has also been a controversial figure in Vancouver's Sikh community in recent years over his running of a community credit union and two Sikh schools. He has attended fundraising dinners for Jean Chrétien, the Prime Minister, and has real estate holdings worth more than $10-million, including a Quality Inn and a mansion assessed at more than $1-million. He owns a Land Rover and two Mercedes -- the newest one bought just last year, according to property registry records. But more striking than his personal success is the way the small, bespectacled Mr. Malik has controlled key Sikh community institutions set up after the Air-India bombing. Mr. Malik is the president of the Khalsa Credit Union, which has $110-million in assets and 16,000 members, and founder of two Khalsa schools that get about $3-million a year from the provincial government. He is also president of two charitable societies -- the Satnam Education Society and the Satnam Trust. He also owns a controversial, unlicensed Punjabi-language radio station, Amrit Bani, and has failed to comply with an order by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission that he shut it down. The soft-spoken millionaire has been the subject of several investigations in the last three years -- an RCMP commercial crime probe of the Khalsa schools, investigations by Canada Customs and Revenue Agency and the Employment Standards Branch and a review of his conduct at the credit union by the regulatory Financial Institutions Commission. Mr. Malik came to Canada in the early 1970s, when he opened an import clothing store in Gastown, Vancouver. His small store blossomed into Papillon Eastern Imports Company, which he runs with his wife, Raminder, as well as Khalsa Development Ltd. and at least two numbered companies. When he first immigrated to Canada, he sported a long pony-tail and dressed in Western, "hippie" clothes. But he was reborn into his religion when he was baptized as a Sikh in 1984 by Bhai Jiwan Singh, head of the fervently religious Akhand Kirtani Jatha, the religious wing of the violent separatist group Babbar Khalsa. Today, he always wears traditional Sikh attire -- a dark turban with an orange undercloth and metal khanda symbol, a flowing Punjabi suit with dark vest and beads called malas to indicate his devotion. Mr. Malik has a wry sense of humour and can be bitingly sarcastic. He likes to read biographies of powerful people such as Margaret Thatcher, the former British prime minister. He has contributed thousands of dollars to several political parties over the years, including the B.C. NDP and the federal Liberals. As Mr. Malik's troubles have mounted, he is said to have assigned people to pray for him 24 hours a day. Asked recently by a reporter if he thought he was a suspect in the Air-India case, Mr. Malik said: "I never used to think like that. But you have put this in my mind." Asked about his relationship with Talwinder Singh Parmar, the radical Sikh founder of Babbar Khalsa who was killed in India in 1992, Mr. Malik refused to answer specifically, but said: "I know all the Sikh leaders and I am very close to them. I am saying to you there is not a leader here in the Sikh community that I did not know from 1972 to 1997 and that includes everybody, including Mr. Parmar." Two weeks ago, Mr. Malik did not seem worried about Air-India charges when he attended a memorial service for Mr. Parmar at a Sikh temple in the Vancouver suburb of Surrey. "I don't have a religious group. I have no affiliation," he insisted during a recent interview. "I only have one affiliation and that is Sikhism." Source: The Vancouver Sun October 28, 2000
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Ripudaman Singh Malik has long been identified as the financier
of militant Sikh separatist groups in Canada and has publicly
acknowledged paying money to the families of some of the prime
suspects in the Air-India bombing.