Sunday, January 24, 2016

The Lies of Malaysia’s Attorney General - A corrupt government seeks to cover up murder


When a Malaysian deputy prosecutor named Kevin Morais disappeared on Sept. 4 last year after leaving his condominium in Kuala Lumpur on his way to work, the rumor spread that the 55-year-old Morais, who was gay, probably had tired of his job with the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission and had left with his lover, probably for London. And, newly-minted Attorney General Mohamed Apandi Ali said, Morais had nothing to do with the controversial MACC probe into Prime Minister Najib Razak’s tangled financial affairs.

It is widely believed that that probe got former Attorney General Abdul Gani Patail fired from his job in July, to be replaced by Apandi Ali, an UMNO stooge and loyalist who served in a variety of different capacities, including as the judge who ruled that Christians couldn’t use the word “Allah” to describe god.

What nobody expected was that Morais would turn up. The rumor about his disappearance was put to the lie when a CCTV camera, by chance, caught Morais’s car being rammed on a Kuala Lumpur street and him being dragged from it. Morais was later found in an oil drum filled with cement in a river in Subang Jaya, a Kuala Lumpur suburb. His burned car was found in a palm oil plantation in Perak. The police said it was an open and shut case. Morais had been killed by confederates of an army doctor in revenge for prosecuting a case against him.

That has been put to the lie as well. Morais’s brother in Atlanta, Ga. in the US turned up in Kuala Lumpur to issue a statement saying Morais was not only working on the Najib case, but he was either leading or co-leading the prosecution, and that he had sent him a USB drive containing information on the case. That has been corroborated by other sources in Kuala Lumpur.

It has since become clear that Morais in addition was one of the sources of deeply detailed information on Najib’s finances that was being fed to Clare Rewcastle Brown, the editor and writer of Sarawak Report. So rather than being killed for revenge by an angry army doctor, it appears that he was killed for being a whistle-blower.

So why was Apandi Ali, the country’s chief law enforcement officer, lying about Kevin Morais’s activities? Why was the lie spread that he had left town with a homosexual lover? Why did the attorney general’s office say Morais had nothing to do with the Najib case?

Apandi Ali has now denounced a story by Sarawak Report – and a similar Asia Sentinel story quoting Sarawak Report –that the MACC had forwarded 37 criminal charges against Najib for prosecution. He has said he sent the case back to the MACC for further work. Is Apandi also lying about that as well?  Given the clear lies about Morais, who does the reader want to believe? Mohamad Apandi Ali or Asia Sentinel and Sarawak Report

Apandi Ali says hehas sent the report back to the MACC for revision. He retires officially in three weeks, meaning he wants to pass the hot potato to his successor, expected to be another UMNZO lawyer, Mohamad Shafie Abdullah.

The story has earned a ban for Asia Sentinel in Malaysia from the communications ministry, which has issued a notice saying “This website is not available in Malaysia because it violates the national laws.” The ban has holes in it, but, say sources in Kuala Lumpur, it is likely to tighten.

It seems more likely that it is the Malaysian government that violates the national laws, not only in the case involving Kevin Morais but in a long list of other cases. For a second one, try the murder of Hussain Najadi, the retired founder of AMBank Malaysia, who was gunned down in a parking lot in 2013. Although law enforcement officials said he was shot in a dispute over a Hindu temple property matter, Hussain’s son Pascal has charged that his father was assassinated because he said he wouldn’t play along with financial irregularities involving the United Malays National Organization prior to his death, refusing to orchestrate a multi-billion ringgit property deal connected to the Kuala Lumpur City Center. On one occasion, he told his son that Prime Minister Najib Razak was “lining his pockets with billions of ringgit with no consideration for the future of the country.”

A gunman was almost immediately arrested. The property dispute story was widely accepted by everybody but Pascal Najadi. The supposed mastermind, one Lim Yuen Soo, went on the run for two years. But Lim, a Melaka gangster and nightclub owner, appeared to be hiding in plain sight. In fact, he was part owner of the Active Force Security Services Sdn Bhd. with the former Malacca Police Chief Mohd Khasni Mohd Nor.

When police caught up with Lim at Kuala Lumpur International Airport, arresting him on an Interpol warrant, they held him incognito for eight days before they turned him loose for “lack of evidence.” But that story raised more questions than it answered. If he could be turned loose for lack of evidence, why wasn’t the original case reopened to find out who had actually paid the gunman to kill Hussain?

As to the probe of Najib’s finances, it is clear from what has emerged in Sarawak Report that he may be a cheap crook as well as a thief of titanic proportions, given the huge amounts of money that apparently have been siphoned from 1Malaysia Development Bhd., the troubled state-backed investment fund.  The MACC, in its probe, found him to be using credit cards from SRC International, a Middle Eastern company supposedly involved in oil exploration that was funded by 1MDB. Najib ran up bills of RM449,000 on an SRC Visa card and another RM2.8 million on an SRC MasterCard in August 2014. That in effect was public money, spent on hotels, meals, jewelry, and other personal items in Italy and Monaco. 

He is already believed to have taken millions in kickbacks on defense contracts and purchases during his years as defense minister, particularly on the purchase of two French submarines as well as purchase of Sukhoi jet fighters at vastly inflated costs and other contracts. Yet, despite the tens of millions stolen, he still had to use credit cards from a publicly owned company to fund his wife’s vast needs for jewelry and handbags.

It was Najib’s years as defense minister that ended up in the 2006 death of the Mongolian translator and party girl, Altantuya Shaariibuu, at the hands of two of Najib’s bodyguards. It has long been assumed that Altantuya was attempting to blackmail Najib’s close friend, Abdul Razak Baginda, over what she knew about the purchase of those submarines.

So in the long run, who do you believe about the deaths of Kevin Morais and Hussain Najadi and Altantuya Shaariibuu, and the subsequent statements by Mohamad Apandi Ali over the MACC probe?  The Malaysian government? Or Sarawak Report and Asia Sentinel, both of which are now banned in Malaysia? Neither publication is likely to stop investigating them.

Asia Sentinel

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