GELANG PATAH – Singapore vehicles entering Malaysia are required to be registered with Malaysia’s Road Transport Department (RTD) or they would be refused entry in a new rule that will come into effect on Sept 1.
Deputy Transport Minister Datuk Abdul Aziz Kaprawi said the mandatory registration applied to all private vehicles, public buses, taxis, goods vehicles as well as diplomatic cars, The Star reported.
The online registration would start on Aug 15, and vehicle owners are required to pay RM10 (S$3.60) for the road charge, which is valid for five years.
“Singaporeans can register their vehicles at all the 72 counters in both the Causeway and Second Link as well as R&R areas near the two main entry points. However, we encourage online registration through the RTD website,” Datuk Abdul Aziz was quoted as saying by the New Straits Times, when he met the press at the Sultan Abu Bakar customs, immigration and quarantine building in Gelang Patah on Saturday.
“RTD will then issue a radio frequency identification (RFID) card after a RM10 registration fee is paid. The registration is valid for five years. The tag will need to be renewed upon expiry, or when the owner buys a new car,” he added.
Once registered, these Singapore vehicles will be allowed through Johor checkpoints for a one-month free trial from Sept 1 to Sept 30, after which from Oct 1 onwards Singapore-registered cars will be charged RM20 per entry for the Vehicle Entry Permit (VEP).
The VEP for foreign vehicles was previously scheduled to begin on Sept 1, after it was postponed from August 1.
The VEP will be on imposed on private passenger vehicles, including multi-purpose and sports utilities vehicles, and payment can be made only with the Touch ‘n Go card.
Government vehicles, motorcycles, public buses and taxis would be exempted from the VEP but they still have to be registered with the RTD.
Datuk Abdul Aziz told The Star the VEP system would have a second phase covering the Malaysia-Thailand border, and that the government hoped for a mid-2016 roll-out.
He added that the VEP fee would likely be the same.
“We have to have standard procedure,” he said.
On August 1 last year, Singapore increased the VEP for foreign vehicles entering the republic from S$20 to S$35 daily.
The Republic also raised the Goods Vehicle Permit from S$10 to S$40.
The Republic is watching political developments in Malaysia closely, said Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, who expressed his hope that the country remains stable.
“When something happens which could cause either a political upset or social or security worries, I think we have to watch very carefully,” said Mr Lee today (July 31). He was interviewed by Ambassador-at-large Chan Heng Chee for A Conversation with the PM: Our Future, Our People, which is airing on Channel NewsAsia and Channel 5 on Sunday (Aug 2).
Professor Chan, who is also chairman of Lee Kuan Yew Centre For Innovative Cities at the Singapore University of Technology and Design, had asked Mr Lee whether the political developments in Malaysia would affect Singapore, and how.
Mr Lee noted that Malaysia is Singapore’s closest neighbour, not just geographically, but also linked by “very big trading ties and investments”.
“We have a lot of people who live and work in Malaysia, a lot of Malaysians work in Singapore…and so when something happens in Malaysia, we watch very carefully and are very concerned how it affects us,” he said.
Malaysia has been in a state of political turmoil of late, with Prime Minister Najib Razak under fire over some US$700 million allegedly funnelled from companies linked to state-owned firm 1Malaysia Development Bhd (1MDB) into his personal bank accounts. Earlier this week, he sacked his deputy Muhyiddin Yassi — who had called on Mr Najib to explain the scandal engulfing 1MDB — as well as four other ministers, and replaced the Attorney-General.
Mr Lee reiterated that Singapore has very good relations with Malaysia. “I personally have very good relations with Prime Minister Najib, so we hope that Malaysia will remain stable, that we will be able to have a Government there which we can do business with and cooperate with, as we have been doing the last few years,” he said.
Foreign Affairs and Law Minister K Shanmugam, who was separately responding to media queries on Malaysia’s recent developments, said when any two countries are as close as Malaysia and Singapore, they will want stability in each other.
“Malaysia and Singapore are linked by an umbilical cord…The total trade between Singapore and Malaysia is S$111 billion and we are amongst each other’s top trading partners and top investors,” said Mr Shanmugam, who reiterated that Singapore is following developments very closely.
He said: “Any instability in Malaysia will also deeply affect Singapore, both economically and in other ways. We depend on Malaysia for water everyday, protected by a treaty. You really don’t want any instability. We hope that there will be stability that is good for Malaysia and good for us.”
Allegations that $700 million (£450 million) in state development funds ended up in Mr Najib’s personal bank accounts overshadowed a visit by the Prime Minister designed to build trade ties.
During a long, one-to-one meeting, Mr Cameron on Thursday urged Mr Najib to clean up his government.
In a pointed move, he then met with civil society leaders, including journalists, the G25 group of campaigners and lawyers, who are campaigning for greater democracy and a free press.
The Prime Minister said: “It is right to go ahead with the visit, but nothing should be off the table. We should talk about these issues including the specific ones now,” he said.
“We always have discussions with civil society figures, anti-corruption campaigners, opposition leaders and all the rest and that will happen on this visit too.
David Cameron meets Najib Razak (centre right) at his offices in Kuala Lumpur (PA)
“I don’t think it helps not traveling to a country and turning away. It is better to go and talk about these things.”
UK officials stressed the visit was to build relationships between “peoples”, not leaders.
After the one-to-one meeting, Mr Cameron is understood to have repeated the message to a wider gathering of Malaysian government figures in front of Mr Najib.
In an address in Singapore on Tuesday, Mr Cameron denounced corruption as the “enemy of progress” that held back growth and fuelled al-Qaeda and migration.
“We have a strong relationship and that enables us to talk difficult issues. I want to raise some of the issues I raised in my speech earlier in the week, such as ethics in business and fighting corruption,” he is understood to have said.
“We should be working together for an open society and open economy.”
Mr Najib is facing growing calls to resign over the allegations, which he denies. He this week fired attorney-general Abdul Gani Patail, who was investigating the scandal, and Muhyiddin Yassin, who had criticised him over the affair.
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.
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.
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.
