Would the Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department, Datuk Azalina Othman Said refer herself to the Parliamentary Committee of Privileges for lying in Parliament, or would there be an Acting Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department appointed to be in charge of parliamentary affairs to refer Azalina to the Committee of Privileges?
Public Accounts Committee (PAC) member and DAP MP for PJ Utara, Tony Pua has made a very serious charge that Azalina had lied in replying to the DAP MP for Bagan Lim Guan Eng that PAC members were informed about the deleted lines from the PAC Report on 1MDB.
Pua said Azalina lied in Parliament when she said in her parliamentary reply on Monday that the PAC Chairman Datuk Hasan Arifin had informed or showed PAC members letter from Bank Negara Malaysia which stated that the information provided to the PAC was confidential and not for public consumption.
Azalina had replied to Guan Eng that Hasan had received Bank Negara’s information which stated all the information given was “confidential for the purpose of intelligence only and not for court usage or public report” and that all PAC members were informed of the matter via a letter penned by the PAC chief to the deputy governor of the central bank on April 6.
I have received confirmation from the Deputy Chairman of PAC, Dr. Tan Seng Giaw (Kepong) that PAC members were never informed about the matter by the PAC Chairman on April 6 and that Azalina had told a lie in Parliament.
Pua had said that the final PAC meeting on April 4 approved the PAC report on 1MDB for publication, and that Hasan “never at any point of time communicated with the PAC members on any developments subsequent to the meeting on April 4”.
Hence PAC members were shocked to discover, upon perusing the tabled report, that two crucial lines in the report was deleted unilaterally by the PAC chairperson.
The lines deleted concerned Bank Negara’s information that Good Star Ltd, into which US$1.03 billion from 1MDB’s joint venture with PetroSaudi International was diverted to, was owned by an individual and not linked to the PetroSaudi group as claimed.
I fully agree with Pua that the deleted lines indicated a brazen case of misappropriation by 1MDB, which also proved as true the allegations made by 1MDB critics such as Sarawak Report, The Edge, The Wall Street Journal and opposition critics.
Why is Azalina trying to hide the fact that the “mover and shaker” of 1MDB, Penang billionaire Jho Low, was in fact the owner of Good Star Ltd and even more important, why a Cabinet Minister is still involved in a conspiracy of silence to hide the true facts of the RM50-55 billion 1MDB global financial scandal from Members of Parliament and 30 million Malaysians – when it is the subject of international investigation by about eight different countries?