The construction industry plays a substantial role in a country’s national economy, irrespective of the country’s levels of
economic development. The Malaysian Government has given a much needed boost to the country’s construction projects under the 9th
Malaysian Plan where a total of 880 projects worth RM15billion (US$48billion) is to be tendered (The Star, 2006). However, Malaysia has
not escaped the problems of project failure. In 2005, 17.3% of 417 Malaysian government contracts projects were considered “sick”.
Project procurement is one of the most important stages of project delivery. Even though ethics in project procurement has been identified
as one of the contributors to project failure, it has not been systematically studied before from the perspective of client in Malaysia. The
aim of this paper is to present an exploration to the ethical issues in project procurement in Malaysian public sector projects. By exploring
ethical issues from client perspective, this could provide an ethical standpoint for the project life cycle and could maintain a good affiliation
between the clients and the customers. It is expected that findings from this review will be somewhat representative of other developing
countries.