Was Najib “promoting national interest” over the 1MDB scandal which was described as “kleptocracy at its worst” causing Malaysia to be in debt for RM39.38 billion which have to be paid by future generations?
Former Prime Minister, Najib Razak, expressed his disappointment with the Court of Appeal judgement that his SRC International Sdn Bhd case was a “national embarrassment”.
He said that throughout his time in public office, he had placed emphasis on promoting national interest.
To be sure, I checked the summary of the Court of Appeal’s Grounds of Judgement which had five paragraphs on the section on “The national interest defence”, which rejected Najib’s defence that all his actions as regards SRC were for the national interest, primarily relying on the testimony of former Attorney-General Apandi Ali, former MACC Chief Commissioner Dzulkifli Ahmad and the former Treasury Secretary-General Mohd Irwan Siregar.
The Court of Appeal stated the general law that the opinion of any person, even if that person is the former Attorney-General, is not relevant in any court proceeding, and found that “it would be rather absurd for the government to guarantee a loan to a government-linked corporate body knowing well that that corporate body does not have the ability to repay the loan or service the interest”.
The judgement continued: “Certainly, it would not be in the national interest to have a stable of insolvent companies, with full government exposure to the loans taken by these companies. That is simply bad financial management of public funds.”
The Court of Appeal found that Najib was “actively involved in ensuring that the KWAP loans were disbursed to SRC”.
However, after the funds had been disbursed, Najib “became indifferent to the whereabouts of the funds, and did not inquire from the SRC as to what had happened to the funds, nor how it was utilized and for what purpose”.
The judgement continued:
“He even instructed the second Finance Minister then to keep off SRC. This conduct of the appellant can be indicative of only one thing, and that is, once the funds had been secured by SRC, over which the appellant had overarching control, he was free to utilize them for his personal benefit. This is manifested by the flow of RM42 million from SRC into his personal accounts. This is not something that can be said to have been done in the national interest. There is no national interest here, just a national embarrassment”.
I agree with the Court of Appeal.
Yesterday, I received a written reply to my parliamentary question from the Minister for Finance, Tengku Zafrul Abdul Aziz that Malaysia owes RM39.39 billion as a result of the 1MDB scandal.’
Was Najib “promoting national interest” over the 1MDB scandal which was described by the former United States Attorney-General Jeff Sessions as “kleptocracy at its worst” causing Malaysia to be in debt for RM39.38 billion which have to be paid by future generations?
May be Najib can clarify.