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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