It appears that The Sarawak Report has successfully procured the classified Auditor-General’s Report on 1MDB with the relevant accompanying documents.
It is a feat even I could not achieve because the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) Chairman Datuk Hasan Arifin has ruled that even PAC members could not retain a copy of the document. This is despite the fact that we have been specifically cleared to access the Report. I could only read the Report during the PAC meetings or upon request at the Parliamentary office.
What is important however, isn’t the feat itself, but the fact that the whole wide world can now confirm what was speculated earlier as the real reason why the AG’s Report has not been declassified and presented to the Parliament. It is because the Auditor-General’s comments on the fishy tales and documents supplied by 1MDB is even more damning than the already damning PAC Report on the 1MDB investigations.
For example, 1MDB made payments to the British Virgin Islands (BVI) Incorporated Aabar Investment PJS Limited amounting to US$1.15 billion between May to November 2014. These were originally explained to the Auditor-General as compensation payments for the termination of options granted to Aabar.
However, much later, after it was exposed that they have separately made another payment of US$993 million for the same purpose in November 2014, 1MDB changed their tune and claimed the US$1.15 billion was meant for a separate “top-up security” Deposit to Aabar.
1MDB even got its Board of Directors to retrospectively approve the above US$1.15 billion “top-up security” payment one year later in November 2015.
This was despite the fact that Arul Kanda, as the Chief Executive of 1MDB would have already received notification from International Petroleum Investment Corporation (IPIC) and its subsidiary, Aabar Investment PJS of Abu Dhabi in July 2015 that the BVI-incorporated Aabar is a fictitious entity unrelated to them!
In the spirit of honesty and decency during the month of AidilFitri celebrations, Dato’ Seri Najib Razak must immediately instruct the declassification of the AG’s Report, which was never meant to be permanently classified. After all, if he has nothing to hide and insists that the Sarawak Report has once again falsified documents and doctored, in this case the AG’s Report, then making public the “real” Report will once and for all destroy Sarawak Report’s credibility.
The failure to declassify the Auditor-General’s Report however, would only prove to Malaysians and the whole wide world that we have a Prime Minister who is guilty of one of the biggest cover up in the history of the world. It would also ultimately confirm the public perception that we are a country run by kleptocrats.
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