was asked to assume to chief minister post if BERJAYA were to come to power. BERJAYA successfully ousted Tun Mustapha in 1976 Sabah state election. One week after the 1976 air crash which killed the chief minister Fuad Stephens and other five state ministers, Harris signed the oil agreement. With Sabah entering the oil agreement, Petronas finally has total control of all oil and gas reserves in Malaysia. Petronas first embarked on the oil exploration and production activities with the formation of Petronas Carigali Sdn Bhd in 1978. In 1980, Petronas expanded its downstream businesses by setting up ASEAN Bintulu Fertiliser plant in Sarawak. Battling oil depletion: the late 1980s Oil exploration was by no means at an end and could yet produce more reserves. The Seligi field, which came onstream at the end of 1988 and was developed by Esso Production Malaysia, was one of the richest oilfields so far found in Malaysia waters, and further concessions to the majors would encourage exploration of the deeper waters around Malaysia, where unknown reserves could be discovered. Meanwhile, computerised seismography made it both feasible and commercially justifiable to re-explore fields which had been abandoned, or were assumed to be unproductive, over the past century. In 1990, Petronas invited foreign companies to re-explore parts of the sea off Sabah and Sarawak on the basis of new surveys using up-to-date techniques. Another way to postpone depletion was to develop sources of oil, and of its substitute, natural gas, outside Malaysia. Late in 1989, the governments of Vietnam and Myanmar (Burma) invited Petronas Carigali to take part in joint ventures to explore for oil in their coastal waters. In 1990, a new unit, Petronas Carigali Overseas Sdn Bhd, was created to take up a 15% interest in a field in Myanmar's waters being explored by Idemitsu Myanmar Oil Exploration Co. Ltd., a subsidiary of the Japanese firm Idemitsu Oil Development Co. Ltd., in a production sharing arrangement with Myanma Oil and Gas Enterprise. Thus began Petronas's first oil exploration outside Malaysia. In May 1990, the governments of Malaysia and Thailand settled a long-running dispute over their respective rights to an area of 7,300 square kilometres in the Gulf of Thailand by setting up a joint administrative authority for the area and encouraging a joint oil exploration project by Petronas, the Petroleum Authority of Thailand, and the US company Triton Oil. In a separate deal,