You should also mention about the article of 12/09/07 (title : “Najib must bear brunt of the RM6.75 billion naval scandal”) written by freelance writer-cum- PKR member, Kim Quek, relating to what he described as “the RM6.75 billion patrol vessel scandal” revealed in the 2006 Auditor General’s Report. See link to RPK’s Malaysia Today in which it’s published : –
http://malaysia-today.net/blog2006/corridors.php?itemid=8117

“There is fairness amongst thieves” – Godfather. Of course, honour as well, and there should be. It is bad to be thieves, but in a given situation where majority, as a class, is implicated (though not admitted), there must, at minimum, a tacit understanding amongst the group not to snitch or adopt an holier than thou attitude to destroy one another’s rice bowl!
To be sure, corruption is as universal as greed and the desire to obtain unfair advantage over others is human.
Corruption involves two aspects : one, political corruption of ruling elites and two, bureaucratic corruption amongst public/civil servants, this group taking the cue and leadership by example from their political bosses.

Corrupt politicians will tolerate a degree of exposure and token action to tackle bureaucratic corruption (as exposed by Auditor General) in order to appease public outrage but if it leads to one of their own within the higher level of political corruption, there is an obvious lack of political will to investigate expose and punish for that which constitutes the raison de etre of why they banded together in the first place.

So in terms of priority political corruption at highest level should be first tackled.

Again to understand political corruption, one may subdivide it into two processes.

The first involves accumulation and extraction of wealth from political position and power via politically facilitated rent seeking ventures/opportunities and creation of cornered markets benefiting businesses owned by cronies in exchange for bribe/commissions from private sector cronies (justifying such activities under “privatization” and its much touted efficiency or the need to raise campaign funding for state and general elections), off-budget transfers of moneys from State controlled enterprises.

And the second involves undemocratic power preservation and perpetuation which includes gerrymandering and electoral fraud, buying voters and votes, controlling parliament, judiciary, control, media and oversight bodies (by appointment, dismissal and punishment of those who don’t tow the line and rewarding them with protection, patronage and favouritism if they do, all the time financing these operations from public money or those raised from earlier stated accumulation and extraction of wealth.

An endemic and systemic corrupt system is hard to cleanse : the whole group has to be booted out but this is almost impossible by ordinary electoral process because the incumbent has already accumulated vast resources of power preservation and perpetuation earlier described to entrench their position, not to mention the divisions and disparateness of ideologies amongst the Opposition parties.

Unless something happens, a cataclysmic event – it is hard to preempt what – that causes widespread public outrage and a sea change of antagonism against the ruling parties.

Until then, the way to ameliorate and mitigate (which is very different from eliminating altogether) political corruption is a slow/snail pace process of evolution of ‘check and balance’ institutions – eg watch dog media, oversight bodies like IPCMC and Human Rights Commission (given bite), a spread of NGOs and civil society, Judicial Commission to ensure independent judiciary, an independent Attorney General appointed at recommendation of the Judicial Commission or the Bar, both AG as well as judge office of tenure that cannot be ended by the Executive, and of course a vigilant and fearless Opposition etc

For this evolution to quicken the people must be educated and pressure for reforms to establish such “check and balance” institutions.

We’re making some progress (snail pace) in this direction but the biggest obstacle is the multiracial, multi cultural and multi religious character of the nation in which race, religion and creed are keenly felt and fanned by political elites to keep everyone divided and distracted from demanding financial probity from them (politicians) and from working towards the entrenchment of check and balance institutions beneficial to all.

That is, in short, the challenge Malaysia is facing today. :)