The Multimedia and Communications Minister Datuk Seri Salleh Said Keruak has continued to exaggerate and overstate the case for the unprecedented violation of world-wide parliamentary practice and convention when the Najib government refused to allow the Auditor-General’s Report on the 1MDB to be presented to Parliament as appendix to the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) Report on 1MDB when the PAC Report was tabled in Parliament on the last day of the March/April meeting on April 7.

This despite three important backgrounds about the AG’s Report on 1MDB, viz:

• Firstly, It is an integral part of the PAC Report on 1MDB, without which the PAC Report would be incomplete;

• Secondly, that the PAC in its proceedings, relied almost entirely on the findings of the AG’s Report to present its deliberations, conclusions and recommendations; and

• thirdly, that PAC members from the government backbench and opposition concurred fully with the AG’s Report and never at any point of time, as recorded in the PAC Hansard, disagreed or rejected the findings.

Salleh, who had been the lone Ministerial voice denouncing the whistleblowing website Sarawak Report’s daily exposes of the AG’s Report on the 1MDB, has taken the extreme position of declaring that the security of the nation was at risk by describing the Sarawak Report exposes of the AG’s Report on 1MDB as “nothing short of an act of treason”.

Salleh will not find significant support from the Malaysian population to agree with his extreme position that the Sarawak Report exposes of the AG’s Report on 1MDB was “an act of treason” when it only confirmed suspicions that the nation’s first global financial scandal, the RM55 billion 1MDB scandal, involved global embezzlement, money-laundering and corruption, which are the subject of investigations by seven separate foreign countries.

Can Salleh give a single instance to rebut the prevailing view that the publication of AG’s Report on 1MDB would pose no grave national security threat but would only confirm suspicions and allegations of 1MDB global embezzlement, money-laundering and corruption?

If Salleh is unable to do so, then he cannot blame the majority of Malaysians for believing that the publication of AG’s Report on 1MDB would pose no grave national security threat but would only confirm and justify foreign investigations of 1MDB’s global embezzlement, money-laundering and corruption and raise the important question as to why the country’s various enforcement and investigative agencies as well as the highest political and legislative chamber of the land, Parliament, have failed their duties in the face of the nation’s first global corruption scandal, involving multi-billion ringgit embezzlement and money-laundering?