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  • PM Najib Razak Courts Middle-Class Muslim Votes With Welcome From “Controversial” Preacher, Mufti Menk

    PM Najib Razak Courts Middle-Class Muslim Votes With Welcome From “Controversial” Preacher, Mufti Menk

    KUALA LUMPUR — Malaysia has rolled out the red carpet for controversial Islamic scholar Ismail Musa Menk, a move that analysts have suggested could be part of efforts by Prime Minister Najib Razak to burnish his Islamic credentials to appeal to middle-class Muslim voters ahead of the general election.

    “(Mufti) Menk is popular among middle-class Malaysian Muslims … and if this is to be read as a political motive, then this … will boost Najib’s popularity with that group,” Dr Norshahril Saat, a Fellow at the Iseas-Yusof Ishak Institute told TODAY.

    The Zimbabwe-born Mufti Menk has more than 2.3 million Facebook fans and 1.3 million Twitter followers who regularly share his positive quotes on life.

    However, the cleric has flirted with controversy: His strong stance against homosexuality led universities in Britain to cancel his speaking tours in 2013 and he had allegedly advised Muslims against wishing others Merry Christmas.

    He was due to give a talk at a religious conference in Singapore in 2015 but his segment was cancelled for “reasons the authorities did not disclose”, according to the organiser.

    Still, Mufti Menk was in Malaysia over the weekend for an Islamic conference where he was one of the keynote speakers.

    Mr Najib hosted a religious talk attended by the preacher at his official residence on Monday night after meeting the latter on Friday, an encounter that the Prime Minister wrote about in his blog. Photos of them were uploaded on both Mr Najib and Mufti Menk’s social media accounts.

    “Victory only comes to those who are most patient,” Mr Najib quoted the preacher in his blog, noting that those were the words that “struck me the most” in their meeting to discuss about Islam, extremism, as well as the plight and welfare of Muslims around the world.

    The Prime Minister referenced the trials and tribulations faced by Prophet Muhammad and said: “This is one of the reasons why that quote by Mufti Menk struck a chord with me. That has been the way of Rasulullah SAW, and must continue to be the way forward for us Muslims.”

    Malaysia’s national polls are not due until next year but Mr Najib is expected to call for snap polls this year after battling issues surrounding state firm 1Malaysia Development Berhad and overcoming efforts by former Malaysian prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad to remove him.

    Throughout last year, Mr Najib’s ruling party, United Malays National Organisation (Umno), increasingly played up the racial and religious cards in a bid to retain the support from the Malays and Bumiputras — a key voting bloc for his party.

    Mr Asrul Hadi Abdullah, a director with political risk consultancy BowerGroupAsia, told TODAY that Mr Najib’s association with Mufti Menk is in line with Umno’s political Islam narrative to capture the Malay community’s votes, as the scholar is popular with the Malay electorate.

    Mr Asrul’s views were echoed by Mr Adib Zalkapli, a political analyst at political risk advisory firm Vriens & Partners, who noted that any association with Mufti Menk is “definitely a vote winner”.

    “Najib is not the first politician to employ this strategy and he won’t be the last. (Former opposition leader) Anwar Ibrahim used the same strategy by getting support from Yusuf Qaradawi when he was on trial for sodomy in 2014,” he said in reference to the renowned Islamic scholar and the head of the Qatar-based International Union for Muslim Scholars.

    Anwar was convicted and jailed for sodomising a former aide, a charge he describes as a politically-motivated attempt to end his career.

     

    Source: www.todayonline.com

  • Thousands Of Malaysians Participated In BERSIH March Against Government

    Thousands Of Malaysians Participated In BERSIH March Against Government

    When they were completed in 1998, the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur were the tallest buildings in the world. At 1,483 feet, they beat out Chicago’s Sears Tower — which had held the record since 1973 — by only 10, but all the same, the superlative was a trophy for a Southeast Asian nation that had transformed itself from a sleepy agrarian society into a crucial economic center in less than a quarter of a century. Specifically, they were a point of pride for Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, who had led Malaysia in its rebirth; so personal was the accomplishment that he himself chose the fixtures in the skyscrapers’ bathrooms.

    On Saturday, Mahathir was one of the many of thousands of people who gathered in the shadow of the towers to demand that Malaysia’s current Prime Minister, Najib Razak, step down from office. “Time has come for us to topple this cruel regime,” Mahathir said, standing on a portable stage before a crowd of roaring supporters dressed in yellow. “Najib is no longer suitable to be the prime minister. He is abusing the law.”

    Saturday’s protest, organized by a group of pro-democracy and anti-corruption activists collectively known as Bersih (the Malay word for “clean”), was the second massive display of outrage towards Najib since July 2015, when the Wall Street Journal and investigative news website Sarawak Report reported that his personal bank accounts held nearly $700 million in cash apparently siphoned from a state development fund called 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB). Najib has strenuously denied the allegations.

    The rally — which attracted around 40,000 people, according to local media reports, though one organizer placed it at twice that — was peaceful, even festive, despite the endemic frustration here. Attendees blew vuvuzelas and shared bottles of water when the equatorial heat proved too oppressive. (Before afternoon thunderstorms accumulated overhead, the thermostat hit close to 90 degrees.) Police blocked access to Merdeka Square, where the march was scheduled to culminate, so organizers deftly regrouped and informed participants over social media that they would instead head to the Petronas Towers. Reports that violent pro-government groups would be there to provoke demonstrators proved false.

    “We’re not out here to create any sort of problems — we just want to be seen and be heard,” 37-year-old Rizal Ahmad, who says he is currently unemployed, tells TIME. “The situation is getting worse, and people are becoming more desperate. We need to be heard.”

    Fahmi Reza, a street cartoonist who has previously been arrested for his work, is blunter. “We live in a country that’s full of clowns and crooks stealing money from us,” he says, raising over his head a large cutout of a caricature of Najib.

    It is hard to discredit their frustration. Najib took power in 2009 promising to bring the country into the 21st century, emphasizing ethnic plurality, economic growth, and good governance. Instead, he has supported not only policies that not only reinforce the country’s ethnic tensions — Malaysia is about 60% ethnic Malay, 25% Chinese, and 10% Indian — but plot the blueprint of a security state. In the year and a half since the 1MDB scandal erupted, he has penalized his detractors, shutting down or prosecuting media outlets that aspire to transparency in their political reporting. His party, the right-wing United Malays National Organization (UMNO), is stronger than ever.

    “We are looking at a collision between what has been a clubby, insular Malaysian political order and the norms and the expectations of the wider world,” Michael Montesano, a researcher at Singapore’s Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, tells TIME. “The nagging question is whether movements like Bersih point to patterns in social change in Malaysia that will lead to a different outcome.”

    The prelude to Saturday’s protest was an anxious one. The night before, it was reported that Maria Chin Abdullah, Bersih’s chairperson, and her colleague Mandeep Singh had been arrested at the Bersih headquarters on charges of “activity detrimental to parliamentary democracy.” On Monday, Rafizi Ramli, a prominent opposition politician, had been sentenced to 18 months in prison for revealing “state secrets” concerning the 1MDB scandal.

    The prosecution of two largely popular progressive figures “tipped the scales,” opposition lawmaker Wong Chen says, prompting Malaysians to flood the streets rather than stay at home. “The government really wants to keep people away, and I think it’s backfiring,” Ambiga Sreenevasan, a human-rights lawyer who organized earlier iterations of Bersih, tells TIME. “The Malaysian people are fuming.”

    Rafizi Ramli is currently out on bail, and when he showed up at Saturday’s demonstration, he was treated as a celebrity. He was a good sport about the dozens of selfies he was asked to pose for.

    “I’ve been in the so-called reform movement since I was 21, and every year we make gains inch by inch,” he told TIME late in the afternoon, as rain began to fall over the city. “It may not seem momentous, but it’s 10 or 15 times more than what it once was. The fact that people come out, in spite of all the intimidation, means that we have reached something that is unstoppable.”

     

    Source: http://time.com

  • Dr Mahathir: Malays Lack Good Values, Lazy And Uncompetitive

    Dr Mahathir: Malays Lack Good Values, Lazy And Uncompetitive

    KUALA LUMPUR — Former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad yesterday once again lashed out at the Malay community in his country, accusing them of lacking good values and being lazy.

    Dr Mahathir said the country’s ethnic majority was not hardworking enough and therefore uncompetitive, causing them to trail behind the other races economically.

    This also resulted in the Malays being driven out from the main cities to the rural interior.

    “Like Alor Setar (the capital of Kedah) and now there are no more Malays there when it was them that raised the city. This is because the Malays are poor and they have no money so they sell their land. So what happens is now they stay outside the city,” said the former leader at a book launch.

    Dr Mahathir, who served as prime minister for 22 years and is regarded as the country’s “Father of Modernisation”, admitted that he may have failed to transform the country’s ethnic majority so that they become more hardworking.

    Despite all the government had done to help them, Dr Mahathir said the Malays still expected things to come easily and refused to adopt working cultures of more successful races, such as those in Japan.

    Japan was an integral part of the Mahathir administration’s Look East Policy. The policy was to push Malaysia to follow the East Asians in becoming diligent, hardworking and loyal.

    “I have tried for 22 years to help the Malays. Maybe I have failed, although some may say that I did achieve some success,” said Dr Mahathir.

    “Values dictate if one race should succeed or not … Like the Japanese, they are ashamed if they fail. That is why they are afraid to fail … But the Malays, they lack shame.”

    Dr Mahathir said the Malays are also bankrupt of honesty. He claimed of first-hand experience in the matter when his bakery company, The Loaf, tried in the past to sack several managers for stealing money from the restaurants.

    He said the establishment of his bakery was to help the Malays by giving them job opportunities but instead they stole his money.

    “That is the problem with the Malays. They don’t have honesty,” he added.

    Dr Mahathir is a staunch defender of race-based affirmative action policies as prescribed by the New Economic Policy, an economic model mooted in 1971 to close the socio-economic gap between the largely-urban Chinese and the rural Malays as well as other indigenous Bumiputera.

    Ironically, however, the former prime minister has admitted in the past that the programme has made the Malays more complacent, while noting that the system had been abused to enrich only a few elites who were close to the ruling party.

    But the former prime minister has continued to defend the policy, saying it was still needed to help the Malays compete and bridge the income disparity among the races.

    Dr Mahathir has also been at the forefront of criticism against Prime Minister Najib Razak and his administration for the past year. He has accused Mr Najib of corruption linked to state investment firm 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB), and has launched a new party, the Parti Pribumi Bersatu Malaysia (PBBM) that he said would ally with the opposition to ensure straight fights against the ruling Barisan Nasional coalition at the next General Election, which has to be called by 2018.

     

    Source: www.todayonline.com

  • Ex-BSI Banker Trial: Yeo Jiawei ‘Lived Jet-Setting Lifestyle, Became More Arrogant’

    Ex-BSI Banker Trial: Yeo Jiawei ‘Lived Jet-Setting Lifestyle, Became More Arrogant’

    Former BSI banker Yeo Jiawei enjoyed a jet-setting lifestyle on super yachts and at luxury resorts after he left to work for controversial Malaysian tycoon Jho Low, a court heard yesterday.

    An employee of financial firm Amicorp Group testified that Yeo – a key figure in an alleged money laundering operation linked to scandal-hit 1Malaysia Development Bhd (1MDB) – became a “consultant and adviser” to Mr Low and Mohamed Ahmed Badawy Al-Husseiny.

    Al-Husseiny is a former high-level official of Abu Dhabi state fund International Petroleum Investment Co (IPIC).

    Amicorp relationship manager Jose Renato Carvalho Pinto told the court Yeo’s relationship with Mr Low was so close that he travelled on his private jet and accompanied him on his luxury yacht Equanimity on a business trip to the Caribbean.

    Yeo stayed at five-star beach-front resort Sandy Lane, one of the most luxurious hotels in Barbados, Mr Carvalho testified.

    He also claimed Yeo arranged for Amicorp to pay invoices totalling US$1.36 million (S$1.9 million) for 27 tickets for Mr Low, Al-Husseiny and several other celebrities to the Manny Pacquiao boxing match at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. The cheapest seat was US$30,000, while the most expensive was US$75,000, Mr Carvalho said.

    He added Yeo also asked Amicorp to top up the Las Vegas casino membership cards of Mr Low and his close associate, Mr Eric Tan Kim Loong, by at least US$1 million each.

    Mr Carvalho further testified that Yeo became “more arrogant and abrasive”, dismissively calling some associates, including Mr Samuel Goh Sze Wei, Mr Kelvin Ang and 1MDB chief financial officer Terence Geh, “working level” people.

    Yeo faces four counts of obstructing justice by allegedly urging witnesses to lie to police and destroy evidence while out on bail after being arrested on March 17 in connection with money laundering.

    Al-Husseiny, who is being investigated over offences under the Swiss Criminal Code, was chief executive of IPIC unit Aabar Investments and a former chairman of Falcon Bank, whose licence was withdrawn by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) last month.

    One reason for Falcon’s shutdown was because its head office failed to guard against conflicts of interest when managing accounts of a customer linked with Al-Husseiny. The MAS said he misled Falcon’s Singapore branch into processing the customer’s “unusually large transactions” despite multiple red flags.

    Mr Carvalho, who was testifying on the fifth day of the trial, said Amicorp was asked by Yeo to set up trusts and also to open bank accounts for several entities as well as for Mr Low and family members.

    IPIC has denied ownership of Aabar BVI, to which 1MDB said it sent US$3.5 billion.

    Yeo allegedly told Mr Carvalho that after leaving BSI, he would work as consultant to Aabar and Al- Husseiny and “collect a 5 per cent fee on every invoice to Aabar”.

    Mr Carvalho also said Yeo claimed that he would be working for sovereign wealth funds that were part of a “highly confidential government-to-government arrangement involving Saudi Arabia and Malaysia”. Mr Carvalho learnt that these were 1MDB and SRC International, which was set up by Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak’s government.

    “I thought Amicorp was cheated by Yeo because he created the story of a ‘g-to-g’ arrangement between countries so he can collect referral fees,” Mr Carvalho said.

    Mr Samuel Goh, the former head of agency distribution at NTUC Income, testified yesterday that he received more than US$4 million for his role as Yeo’s partner in alleged kickback deals linked to 1MDB.

     

    Source: The Straits Times

  • Najib: RM42 Bilion Tidak Hilang Dari 1MDB, Dakwaan Mahathir Tidak Betul

    Najib: RM42 Bilion Tidak Hilang Dari 1MDB, Dakwaan Mahathir Tidak Betul

    Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak hari ini (7 Apr) berkata laporan Jawatankuasa Kira-Kira Wang Negara (PAC) mengenai 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) menunjukkan RM42 bilion tidak hilang daripada syarikat itu.

    Mantan Perdana Menteri Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad sebelum ini membuat dakwaan tersebut.

    Perdana Menteri berkata di samping menunjukkan bahawa dakwaan dibuat oleh Dr Mahathir itu adalah tidak betul, laporan itu mengenal pasti kelemahan-kelemahan dalam struktur modal dan pengurusan 1MDB.

    “Kami akan teliti dan bertindak ke atas syor-syor dalam laporan itu.

    “Kami akan memastikan pengajaran diambil daripadanya, dan tindakan akan diambil jika terdapat sebarang bukti kesalahan telah dilakukan,” katanya dalam kenyataan bagi mengulas laporan itu, yang dibentangkan di Dewan Rakyat hari ini.

    Datuk Seri Najib berkata kini sudah jelas bahawa dakwaan dilemparkan Dr Mahathir terhadap 1MDB didorong oleh kepentingan peribadi, “bukan kepentingan negara, dan hasrat untuk menjatuhkan kerajaan”.

    Perdana Menteri berkata beliau sudah mengarahkan Kabinet pada Mac 2015 untuk meminta Ketua Audit Negara menjalankan siasatan bebas ke atas akaun kewangan 1MDB susulan pelbagai tuduhan dilemparkan terhadap 1MDB, seperti dakwaan Dr Mahathir bahawa RM42 bilion sudah hilang.

    “Untuk memastikan ketelusan proses ini, kami juga telah mengarahkan supaya dapatan-dapatan itu dihantar untuk semakan oleh Jawatankuasa Kira-Kira Wang – sebuah badan dwipartisan yang turut dianggotai anggota Parlimen pembangkang,” katanya.

    Datuk Seri Najib berkata selepas melalui proses yang lengkap dan menyeluruh, PAC hari ini mengeluarkan laporan mengandungi dapatan-dapatannya di Parlimen.

    “Laporan ini mewakili konsensus oleh anggota PAC, dan dapatan-dapatannya adalah berdasarkan fakta dan beratus-ratus jam menyemak dan menyiasat.

    “Saya ingin mengucapkan terima kasih kepada Jabatan Audit Negara dan PAC kerana mengeluarkan laporan yang komprehensif, konklusif dan muktamad.

    “Selepas membacanya, saya mendapati laporan PAC menunjukkan bahawa RM42 bilion tidak hilang daripada 1MDB, seperti didakwa oleh Tun Mahathir,” katanya.

    Datuk Seri Najib berkata kerajaan akan terus memberi tumpuan terhadap “pelan ekonomi dan memperkukuhkan ekonomi – yang terus menunjukkan daya tahan dalam berdepan cabaran-cabaran global”.

    Source: Berita Mediacorp