Malaysia needs a new anti-corruption campaign when a former Prime Minister was of the view that that the salary of then Chief Secretary of the Government, which was higher than that of the Prime Minister, was “too low”

Malaysia needs a new anti-corruption campaign when a former Prime Minister was of the view that the salary of the then Chief Secretary of the Government, which was higher than that of the Prime Minister, was “too low”.

Parliament, which is set to meet for 12 days from July 18 to August 4, must set the stage for such an anti-corruption campaign.

For a start, the Prime Minister, Ismail Sabri, should make a Ministerial statement in Parliament on what his government is doing to ensure that Malaysia can become among the top 30 countries with the least corruption by 2030, a target which was supposed to be achieved in 2008 under the discredited National Integrity Plan.

The Prime Minister should also make public at the July meeting of Parliament the salaries and allowances of all the heads of the government-linked companies (GLCs) and government-linked investment companies (GLICs), whether 1MDB, Petronas, Khazanah, EPF, Permodalan Nasional Bhd (PNB), Lembaga Tabung Haji (LTH), Lembaga Tabung Angkatan Tentera (LTAT), Axiata Group Bhd, Telekom Malaysia Bhd., Tenaga Nasional Bhd, the National Trust Fund (KWAN), Kumpulan Wang Pesaraan (KWAP), the Ministry of Finance Inc (MoF Inc), Maybank, Sime Darby Bhd., CIMB Group Holdings, MISC Bhd, Proton Holdings or Malaysian Resources Corporation Bhd.

In August last year, the government launched Perkukuh with 20 initiatives to reform Malaysia’s GLCs and GLICs, but sorely lacking is the need to make the GLCs and GLICs models of transparency and public integrity, as the GLCs and GLICs have been corrupted by politicians - making everyone think that GLCs and GLICs are bad.

There must be a clean-up of the GLC system, including the thousands of government-linked companies that are not publicly listed.

There must be an all-party Parliamentary Select Committee entrusted with the task of this new anti-corruption campaign, which should undertake a clean-up of the GLCs and GLICs to make them into model entities of transparency and public integrity.

I am most concerned to discover that there is more concern in Indonesia than in Malaysia at the state of corruption in these two countries.

In 1995, when Transparency International (TI) first published its first annual Corruption Perception Index (CPI) report, Malaysia was ranked No. 23 and had a score of 5.32 out of 10 points while Indonesia was ranked the last of 41 countries with a score of 1.94 out of 10 points.

In the last 24 years from 1995, Indonesia had made great strides in the war against corruption while Malaysia had regressed.

In the TI CPI 2021, Indonesia is ranked No. 96 with a score of 38 out of 100 points as compared to Malaysia’s rank of 62 and score of 48.

Will Indonesia overtake Malaysia in the TI CPI series at the end of this decade in eight years’ time, as Malaysia’s TI CPI 2022 is expected to be worse both in rank and score than the TI CPI 2021.

A new anti-corruption campaign, the clean-up of the GLCs and GLICs and to ensure that Malaysia does not continue to regress in the war against corruption and prevent the likelihood that Malaysia will lose out to Indonesia in the TI CPI series before 2030 should be the major issues in the July meeting of Parliament.

Lim Kit Siang MP for Iskandar Puteri