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Sarawak Report: Attorney-General Fired Preparing Arrest Warrant For Najib Razak

Sarawak Report has acquired documents, now verified, which explain exactly why Abdul Gani Patail was dramatically fired on Monday.

The Attorney General was on the brink of bringing charges for corruption against the Prime Minister of Malaysia.

We have acquired the secret draft charge sheet documents, which Gani Patail was in the process of drafting.

They include a charge sheet for corrupt practices under Section 17 (a) of the MACC Act, allowing for punishment of a sentence of up to 20 years in prison under Section 24 of the Act.

In an unprecedented situation the person being charged was none other than the Prime Minister “Dato’ Seri Mohd Najib Bin Tun Abdul Razak” along with a company director, Dato’ Shamus Anuar Bin Sulaiman.

The explosive information hits Malaysia in the middle of a highly controversial visit by the British Prime Minister, who had been widely warned against making such a visit in the midst of Malaysia’ biggest political scandal in decades.

The documents, which were being worked in their final draft stages by the Attorney General, were sent to Sarawak Report following the sacking of Gani Patail and have now been verified by other senior parties.

In English the first of two draft warrants spell out the charges being brought by Malaysia’s most senior law officer (who was unconstitutionally dismissed by the Prime Minister the day after these drafts were printed).

The warrant cites that the Prime Minister and Shamsul Anuar and “another person still at large Nik Ariff Bin Faisla Kamil” on 26th of December 2014 at the AmIslamic Bank, Bangunan Ambank Group in Kuala Lumpur, as an agent of the Malaysian Government, namely the Prime Minister of Malaysia and special advisor of SRC International, did secretly obtain a sum of money amounting to RM27 million that was paid through the company Gandingan Mentari and Ihsan Perdana to “your account at AmPrivate Banking -1MY no 211201101880″ with the principal aim of obtaining a loan from Kumpulan Wang Persaraan pension fund.

“As such you have committed an offence under Section 17(1) of the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Act of 2009, under which you can be punished according to Section 24 of the Act, to be read with Section 34″.

The punishment cited at the base of the document is imprisonment of not more than 20 years and a fine not less than five times of the value of the bribe taken or RM10,000, whichever is higher.

Raiding Malaysia’s public pension fund KWAP!

The crime referred to has already been widely reported following exposes by Sarawak Report and the Wall Street Journal at the start of this month.

We produced documents from the task force investigation into 1MDB, which showed that its former subsidiary SRC International (whose CEO is Nik Kamil) had made a number of payments into the Prime Minister’s personal accounts totalling millions of ringgit over a period from last December to this February.

The payments went through the companies Gandingan Menteri Sdn Bhd, of whom the Director was Nik Faisal Ariff Kamil (also wanted for questioning) and Ihsan Perdana Sdn Bhd, whose Director Shamus Anuar is also cited in the warrant.

Criminal Breach of Trust

A second, alternative draft charge was being worked on by the Attorney General, which Sarawak Report has also obtained.

The second charge relates to the same act on the same day, but refers more specifically to the Prime Minister’s position of trust with regard to the company SRC. In English it reads:

“Secret

The first draft of the charge (alternative)

That you on 26.12.2014 in AmIslamic Bank Berhad, AmBank Group Building, No. 55 Jalan Raja Chulan, Kuala Lumpur Federal Territory as an agent, as Prime Minister and Finance Minister of Malaysia and Special Adviser (Emeritus Advisor) Company SRC International Sdn Bhd which in that capacity, is entrusted with the control of the fund company, has criminal breach of trust funds, namely dishonestly disposing of SRC International Sdn Bhd Company amounted RM27 juta to your account AmPrivate Banking-1MY no. 2112022011880 via coupling Mentari Sdn Bhd Corporate and Company Ihsan Perdana Sdn Bhd. Therefore you committed the offense and punishable taken of Section 409 of the Penal Code, read together with section 34 of the Penal Code

Penalties:
Sabit errors can be jailed for a minimum of 2 years and a maximum of 20 years and with whipping, and a fine.

Headquarters Complaint No. AU / Rpt No. 252/2015

Sacked!

A close insider has now confirmed to Sarawak Report that Patail had arrived at his office on Monday morning expecting to finalise the extremely sensitive charges he was preparing against the Prime Minister, resulting from the investigations of the multi-agency task force into 1MDB.

“He was finalising it. He went to his office and found he could not go in. Ali Bin Hamsa, the Chief Secretary to the Government, was waiting and he told him [the Attorney General, Abdul Gani Patail] that he was dismissed. He could not even get his papers.”

Within hours of this secret drama at the heart of government, as all Malaysia knows, the Prime Minister had moved to effect what has been described as an attempted coup d’etat.

The head of Special Branch was removed, the Deputy Prime Minister was dumped and four members of the investigating Parliamentary Accounts Committee were elevated without choice to positions in Cabinet and its work was declared suspended.

Other known cabinet critics of the the 1MDB scandal have also been unceremoniously dismissed by the Prime Minister.

It has been also been announced that tomorrow’s meeting of the UMNO Supreme Council, representing the key leadership of the ruling party, has also been cancelled by the Prime Minister.

Now all Malaysia knows why the Prime Minister has moved to sack the countries top legal officers and top politicians.

In an irony of perfect timing the Prime Minister is now seeking to use the visit of Britain’s David Cameron as an endorsement of his unconstitutional move to hijack the State of Malaysia.

Source:www.sarawakreport.org

July 31, 2015
MH 370 Search: Experts Investigate Indian Ocean Wreckage

Malaysia has sent a team to the French Indian Ocean island of Reunion to determine whether debris which washed up there is from missing flight MH370.

The Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 travelling from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board vanished without trace in March 2014.

Aviation experts have said the debris looks like a wing component from a 777, known as a flaperon.

Malaysia Airlines said it would be “premature” to speculate on its origin.

There were 227 passengers on the flight, including 153 Chinese and 38 Malaysians.

“Whatever wreckage found needs to be further verified before we can further confirm whether it belongs to MH370,” Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai told reporters in New York where he was attending a UN Security Council debate for a separate Malaysian jet shot down over Ukraine.

“So we have dispatched a team to investigate on this issues and we hope that we can identify it as soon as possible,” he said.

French air transport officials are also investigating the wreckage

The wife of the in-flight supervisor for the missing MH370 plane, Jacquita Gonzales, told the BBC that she is torn by the news.

“A part of me hopes that it is (MH370) so that I could have some closure and bury my husband properly but the other part of me says ‘no, no, no’ because there is still hope,” she told the BBC by phone.

The two-metre-long (6ft) piece of wreckage washed up on the island, about 600km (370 miles) east of Madagascar, late on Wednesday.

The search efforts for MH370, led by Australia, are focussed on a broad expanse of the southern Indian Ocean – some 6,000km to the east of Reunion, which is a French region.

There have been other plane crashes much closer to Reunion, but flight MH370 is the only Boeing 777 to have disappeared in the area.

Officials said in April that the search area would be doubled if nothing was found

An US official told the Associated Press news agency that, based on the photos, investigators had a “high degree of confidence” that the part was a flaperon unique to a Boeing 777 wing.

A flaperon is a part of the wing used to manage the lift and control the roll of an aircraft.

French authorities in Reunion are also investigating the debris and Australian investigators are reported to be in touch with manufacturers over the find.

In a statement, Australian Infrastructure Minister Warren Truss said that if the wreckage was identified as being from MH370, this “would be consistent with other analysis and modelling that the resting place of the aircraft is in the southern Indian Ocean”.

Any new evidence will be used to refine search efforts, the statement added.

Analysis: BBC’s transport correspondent Richard Westcott

Experts should be able to tell fairly quickly if this is a piece of MH370. Aircraft parts have individual serial numbers on them, and the airlines should have records of all those numbers.

So in theory, investigators could check them and give a positive or negative ID. If it is part of the aircraft, it’s washed up thousands of miles from where search teams continue to look for debris at the bottom of the sea.

And realistically, although it would confirm the aircraft crashed and broke up, a piece of wing is unlikely to reveal much more about what actually happened on board the plane.

But these are all big “ifs” right now. It could still be yet another false alarm.

Follow Richard: @BBCwestcott

The tenacious deep-sea hunt for MH370

The Australian-led search teams have been focusing on a 60,000 sq km (23,000 sq mile) area off the coast of Western Australia, where the plane is believed to have crashed.

Australian Transport Safety Bureau Chief Commissioner Martin Dolan, who heads the operation, told AP that even if the part was proven to be from MH370 it would not change the search area, as it was “entirely possible that something could have drifted from our current search area to that island”.

Confirmation the debris came from MH370 would also disprove theories that the airliner went missing somewhere in the northern hemisphere, Mr Dolan said.

Key moments in the search for MH370

8 March, 2014: Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 departed from Kuala Lumpur International Airport on Saturday 8 March (16:41 GMT, 7 March), and was due to arrive in Beijing at 06:30 (22:30 GMT). Malaysia Airlines says the plane lost contact less than an hour after takeoff. No distress signal or message was sent.

20 March: Australian search teams say they are investigating two objects spotted on satellite images in the southern Indian Ocean and sent long-range surveillance planes to the area. The objects were later revealed not to be from MH370.

24 March: The Malaysian prime minister announces that following further analysis of satellite data it was beyond doubt that the plane had gone down in this part of the ocean.

28 March: The main search area was moved 1,100km (684 miles) to the north-east and closer to Australia, following further analysis of the speed of the plane and its maximum range.

5-8 April, Australian and Chinese vessels using underwater listening equipment detected ultrasonic signals, which officials believed could be from the plane’s “black box” flight recorders. The pings appeared to be the most promising lead so far, and were used to define the area of a sea-floor search.

29 May: Australian officials announced that the search had found nothing and the area where the signals were heard could be ruled out as the final resting place of the plane.

26 June: Officials announced a new 60,000 sq km search area some 1,800 km west of Perth. This phase of the operation started in August with detailed mapping of the sea bed.

16 April, 2015: Officials from Australia, Malaysia and China say the search area would be doubled if nothing is found in the current search zone.

Source: www.bbc.com

July 30, 2015
Malay Wedding – Not A Budget Affair

EDIT: Okay, I wasn’t expecting so many shares. I’m sorry if this offended anyone, but I would like to say that of course the figures vary, and it CAN vary greatly. The only reason this one costs this much is because almost everything an average Malay wedding has was factored in. However, and with that being said, this infographic is NOT implying that you have to spend this amount. Of course it’s a DUH thing (common sense!) to spend within your budget. The whole point of this is to inform the uninformed that Malay weddings are definitely not $50.
_____

I would say 8 out of 10 non-Malays I know are often plain ignorant when it comes to the expenses involved in a Malay wedding. In fact, I have met many of such people who have this impression that a Malay wedding only costs so much. To help address this common problem as well as to educate the non-Malays, I decided to create a simple visual graphic that breaks down the expenses of a Malay wedding in Singapore.

Disclaimer: These are average figures I got from speaking to my married and about-to-get-married friends, and they do not necessarily represent the mass. Also, the figures are based on only one side of the couple. So yes you are right – multiply them by two to get the final figures for both bride and groom’s events.

To all my Malay friends, if you have any input(s)/comment(s) on this, drop me a message!

P/S: Oh, I would also like to add one more point – Malay weddings usually never expect monetary recoup. We don’t complain even if we receive $10 (common amount, honestly) after feeding your family of 8!

Source: Nur Haryanti

July 30, 2015
AWARE: Children Of Unwed Mothers Should Not Be Penalised For Family Structure

Under a policy review by the Social and Family Development Ministry announced on Jul 28, unwed working mothers may soon get the same benefits as married ones.

Welcoming the announcement, the Association of Women for Action and Research (AWARE) said children of unwed mothers should not be penalised for their family structure.

Unwed mothers currently do not benefit from housing policies and tax reliefs such as the Qualifying Child Relief, Working Mother Child Relief and Grandparent Caregiver Relief, and that makes it harder to raise a child, said a single mother.

Susan (not her real name) is a 40-year-old who works in the events industry. She hopes the revised policy will be fairer to unwed mothers and their children.

“What I’m requesting is very basic. These are basic necessities like housing, you need a roof over your head. I wanted to apply for a BTO flat but as a single, I can only apply for a two-room flat. But I can’t live with my child in a one-bedroom flat so I appealed to HDB to request to apply for a three-room BTO flat but it has been denied a couple of times. So I had no choice but to buy in the open market,” Susan said.

“Why would I want to share a room with my son? I mean, when he’s younger it’s fine but when he is older, I’m sure he would want his own room,” she added.

Under rules by the Housing and Development Board (HDB), an unwed mother and her child are not considered a family nucleus and therefore do not qualify for a new three-room flat.

AWARE said this puts these families at a disadvantage as they are not given the same support as other families.

Ms Jolene Tan, Programmes and Communications Senior Manager at AWARE, said: “If you can’t afford a resale flat, then you find yourself in the situation of perhaps having to seek the goodwill of other relatives or to go to interim rental housing and all of this can create instability in the family environment.”

AWARE acknowledged that unwed mothers are not excluded from all benefits. For example, they are eligible for infant care and childcare subsidies. But the association said unwed mothers should not be excluded from any benefits at all and should receive even more support from the government.

Nominated Member of Parliament Kuik Shiao-Yin, who has brought the issue of unfair treatment of single unwed mothers up in Parliament previously, said that the review of policies is encouraging to hear. She added that this is an equalisation of opportunities as children of single unwed mothers can now start off on the same footing as children of married mothers.

The policy review is expected to be completed before the announcement of Budget 2016.

Source: www.channelnewsasia.com

July 30, 2015
“Raise Fares To Improve Train Service”

“Raise fares to improve train service”, says the title of the letter to the Straits Times forum page on Wednesday.

Mr Jonathan Toh Joo Khai, the writer, pointed at the Public Transport Council (PTC), which regulates public transport fares, as the “root cause of SMRT’s frequent train breakdowns.”

“The fare hikes are miserly compared with the rate of inflation,” Mr Toh said.

He then rattled off a litany of “financial indicators” of the SMRT which, he said, “had been falling for five straight years.”

“Unlike other companies, SMRT cannot shed its money-losing train business,” Mr Toh said. “Yet, it is yet expected to improve reliability even as the PTC moderates fare hikes to meet the demands of commuters, some of whom even want a freeze to fare hikes until reliability improves.”

“How is that possible?” he asked.

He argued that “train fares in Singapore are low relative to gross domestic product per capita.”

Mr Toh thus called for fares to be increased, and that discounts be given to those in need.

“The rest who happily use our latest flashy iPhones and Samsungs to kill time on the trains can surely afford a fare hike,” he concluded.

The public transport operators (PTOs) make yearly application, usually towards the end of the year, for “fares review”, which the PTC will consider and decide on several months later, usually around March.

Mr Toh’s call is not new and is the latest in the last two years or so from various quarters who have also also called for higher fares for buses.

In January 204, for example, this report appeared in the TODAY newspaper:

TODAY, Jan 2014

“Rather than complain about both poor service and fare increases, perhaps it is time for a shift in commuters’ thinking towards paying even more, so that we get the transport services we deserve in a world-class city,” the writer said.

About four months later, the former chairman of the PTC, Gerard Ee, echoed the same sentiments.

Straits Times, May 2014

“At the end of the day, buses and trains are about transporting a lot of people from Point A to B as affordably as possible,” Mr Ee said. “So by that very nature, they are going to be crowded. They’re not designed for comfort.

“If you treasure your time and treasure your comfort, you pay a premium – there are premium bus services. If you value your time and comfort even more, buy a car. And then ultimately, get a chauffeur. You have to decide for yourself what it is you want.”

Straits Times, Jan 2014

But in January 2014, the PTC itself delinked the relationship between fare hikes and better service, particularly breakdowns of the system.

The PTC’s remarks were in response to public sentiments that fares should not go up when trains are still breaking down.

“[The] Public Transport Council (PTC) has said that the two issues should be kept separate,” the Straits Times reported.

Nonetheless, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said in September last year that progress and improvements have been made, and that “there are not so many breakdowns as before.”

But just three months later, the TODAY newspaper reported that the “number of major MRT delays had hit a] four-year high.”

Sept 2014

There were 12 “major delays” in the first nine months of 2014 alone, the newspaper reported. This was more than the 11 for the entire year in 2011, the previous record number of delays.

And on Thursday, 30 July 2015, the Straits Times reported that there have already been “five major delays in Q1, nearly half last year’s total.”

Straits Times, 30 July 2015

“[There] were five service delays lasting more than 30 minutes between January and March this year,” the Straits Times said.

This included a disruption in February where a breakdown in the line between Yew Tee and Kranji station lasted for four hours and 38 minutes.

And earlier in July, the entire train system was shut-down for several hours due to a train fault, affecting 250,000 commuters.

Would all these problems disappear with the simple solution of increasing fares?

One would be hard-pressed to argue for such a simplistic expectation.

Yet, the truth is that much public funds have been poured into the transport system, billions in fact, and billions more have been earmarked for the same in the next decade.

And are the PTOs making losses?

If they were, there would be no justification for them to double the salary of their chief executive officer, as SMRT did this year, raising its CEO pay from S$1.2m in 2013, to $2.25m to $2.5m in 2015. (See here: “SMRT CEO paid $2.2m to $2.5m – a multifold jump in three years?“.

Source: www.theonlinecitizen.com

July 30, 2015