I was stunned when I stood up late last night to debate the 2009 Budgetary estimates for the Defence Ministry to be told by the Deputy Speaker Ronald Kiandee, that MPs are limited to five minutes each!
The Defence Ministry has a budget of RM13 billion for next year and is one of the six big-spending [...]

On November 11, Public Accounts Committee (PAC) Chairman Datuk Seri Azmi Khalid had promised that the PAC report on its inquiry into the RM1.6 billion Eurocopter deal would be tabled in Parliament “in two or three days”.
How can Azmi’s interpretation of “two or three days” be so elastic as to stretch to three weeks, and [...]

No Public Accounts Committee (PAC) report on its inquiry into the RM1.6 billion Eurocopter deal has been tabled in Parliament today although the PAC Chairman Datuk Seri Azmi Khalid had promised last Wednesday that the PAC report would be ready to be tabled in two or three days.
More than a month had passed since [...]

I thank Datuk Seri Azmi Khalid for committing a grave parliamentary impropriety yesterday in compromising his position as the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) Chairman and trying to hit out at me in Parliament for my earlier criticisms of him in mishandling the PAC inquiry into the RM1.6 billion Eurocopter helicopter deal, resulting [...]

Yesterday, the Star carried a letter by an ex-airman contending that “We don’t need the Eurocopter”.
He wrote:
“AS an ex-RMAF serviceman for 22 years, I believe I am qualified to comment on our government’s insistence on purchasing the Eurocopters. Worse still, without any physical tests.
“Buying the Eurocopter for use in Malaysia is like buying an F1 [...]

Public Accounts Committee Chairman Datuk Seri Azmi Khalid has provided the most eloquent testimony why there is a Commonwealth parliamentary convention that a senior Opposition parliamentarian should be head of the PAC (and why a Minister who has just stepped down from the Cabinet should not head the PAC) if the parliamentary watchdog [...]

Are Nuris “flying coffins”? If not, why not just upgrade them for a few hundred million ringgit, a small fraction of the cost as compared to the billion-ringgit purchase of Cougar EC725 Eurocopters, which are 40-year-old Cougars in any event?
This is one important question which the Public Accounts Committee should probe, answer [...]