Pay Cut Motion for Minister of Domestic Trade

I have filed today a motion to deduct the remuneration of Minister of Domestic Trade, Cooperatives and Consumerism by RM10.

As highlighted in my earlier press statements, the Minister Datuk Ismail Sabri has abused his powers to selectively prosecute Suara Inisiatif Sdn Bhd (Suaram) to serve Barisan Nasional’s political agenda.  The Minister has used the Companies Comission of Malaysia (CCM) to go on a fishing trip to “investigate” an unsubstantiated “misleading accounts” allegation.

On the other hand he has failed to take any against the list of 5 Umno-linked companies we have cited which clearly failed to submit their financial accounts on a timely manner, some since 2007.  The companies and their directors, including Umno Members of Parliament, Khairy Jamaluddin and Abdul Rahman Dahlan, are listed below.  We are convinced that there are perhaps hundreds of other companies which have blatantly flouted the Companies Act 1965 with little or no action taken by CCM.

In fact, the decision to file the above motion is further justified by the findings of the Auditor-General Report which highlighted that the CCM failed to go after directors who owed more than half a million ringgit in compound fines.

An example listed in the report is that of a director who registered a whopping 683 companies and chalked up 135 compounds for a total of RM640,000 in fines, but no action was taken.

The report also listed out four other similar cases where company directors had between 85 and 135 compound fines issued against them, amounting to between RM640,000 and RM490,000 in fines.

Despite the huge sum of compound fines due, the report said, these directors were still actively registering new companies, and without any hurdle.

The irony of the Suaram persecution is the criticism by the Auditor-General that the numbers of cases referred to the prosecution department of CCM were very low.  The cases referred by the KL branch for prosecution came to only 1.5 percent or RM8.59 million worth in compound fines, out of a total of RM554.94 million worth of uncollected compounds.

The Minister must hence answer in Parliament to the sheer lack of competence in the administration of Companies Commission of Malaysia.  Datuk Ismail Sabri must answer to Malaysians why the Umno-linked companies have never been prosecuted by the authorities despite blatant breaches of the law, and yet the Government is seeking to persecute Suaram with highly dubious and unsubstantiated allegations of “misleading accounts”.