The Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Najib Razak should immediately declassify the Auditor-General’s Report on 1MDB not only to take the wind out of the sails of the whistleblowing site, Sarawak Report, but to show to the world that the Malaysian Prime Minister and government have nothing to hide about allegations of 1MDB multi-billion ringgit global embezzlement, money-laundering and corruption.

The option to keep the Auditor-General’s Report on 1MDB secret and classified under the Official Secrets Act (OSA) was never a tenable, sustainable or wise decision in this information age when information travels at the speed of light in a borderless world, especially when the decision went against all notions of good governance and principles of accountability and transparency, as well as public pledges by the Prime Minister, the Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) and the Auditor-General himself that the AG’s Report would be made available to the public.

With the announcement by the Sarawak Report website that it is publishing in full the Auditor-General’s Report on 1MDB, after it had carried daily exposes of the AG’s Report on 1MDB in the past few days, Najib and the Malaysian Government are only inviting global scorn, contempt and humiliation if they continue to keep the AG’s Report under wraps in Malaysia under the OSA while it is available to the world as well as to Malaysians on the borderless Internet.

The Cabinet at its meeting yesterday should have discussed the subject of the declassification of the AG’s Report to defend Malaysia’s international reputation and image. Was this subject discussed by the Ministers yesterday? Read the rest of this entry »

Jeffrey Voegeli and Chanyaporn Chanjaroen
Bloomberg
July 13, 2016

UBS Group AG flagged suspicious transactions linked to 1Malaysia Development Bhd. to the Monetary Authority of Singapore, prompting an investigation of the accounts involved, a person familiar with the matter said.

The transactions were not immediately recognized by UBS as suspicious, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the matter is private. At least $1.24 billion was transferred in 2014 from the account of a 1MDB subsidiary held at BSI SA in Lugano, Switzerland, to a UBS account in Singapore held by what appeared to be a unit of an Abu Dhabi company, U.K.-based investigative blog Sarawak Report said on July 11.

A spokeswoman for UBS declined to comment on the 1MDB transfers. When asked about the UBS case, the Singapore regulator referred to its previous statements made on March 31 and May 24. MAS has said it is conducting supervisory reviews of several financial institutions and bank accounts through which suspicious and unusual transactions have taken place, without identifying the parties involved. Read the rest of this entry »