Khalid aide likens PKR dossier on Selangor MB to ‘50 Reasons’ on Anwar
(Malay Mail Online) – PKR’s dossier on why Tan Sri Khalid Ibrahim should no longer be Selangor mentri besar is akin to a 1998 defamatory book titled 50 Reasons Why Anwar Cannot Become Prime Minister that was circulated before the controversial sacking of Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim as deputy prime minister, Faekah Husin has said.
The CEO of Mentri Besar Incorporated, a state conglomerate, said in an interview with Malay-language daily Berita Harian published today that Khalid, who was once hailed as a model leader, was now pictured as a most terrible human being.
“The dossier that PKR had released to justify Abdul Khalid’s sacking as something legitimate and ‘halal’, is quite like the 50 Dalil book that was published at one time,” Faekah was quoted saying.
“If I can summarise it briefly, this crisis was created when Tan Sri Abdul Khalid Ibrahim was forced to resign as mentri besar without any good reason, and after just one year when the opposition pact, which he had led in Selangor, won big, winning more than three quarters of the state seats in the 13th general election,” she added.
Authored by the late Datuk Jafri Khalid Bakar Shah, a former editor with Umno-controlled paper Utusan Malaysia, the book 50 Dalil Kenapa Anwar Tidak Boleh Jadi PM (50 Reasons Why Anwar Cannot Become Prime Minister) was said to contain explicit details of the then-deputy prime minister’s sexual dalliances with both men and women, corruption, abuse of power and sedition.
The book was distributed at the Umno general assembly in June 1998 — at a time when Anwar was campaigning against nepotism and corruption — after then-Umno Youth chief Datuk Seri Ahmad Zahid Hamidi speech against corruption within the Malay party, Time magazine said in a 1998 report.
Anwar was later sacked from government and charged with corruption and sodomy, accusations that he has dismissed as a smear campaign.
The former protégé of Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad spent six years in prison before the Federal Court overturned his sodomy conviction in 2004.
Anwar later went on to lead the opposition pact comprising PKR, DAP and PAS that denied Barisan Nasional its customary two-thirds majority in Parliament in the 2008 general election.
The loose opposition coalition then banded formally as Pakatan Rakyat and made further grounds in the 13th general election last year, but is now facing one of its worst crises in PKR’s attempt to replace Khalid with party president Datuk Seri Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail as Selangor mentri besar.
Just four days after PKR released a dossier to allies PAS and the DAP listing the reasons why it wanted to drop Khalid as MB, he was sacked from the party.
In the document, PKR listed Khalid’s questionable out-of-court settlement with Bank Islam, Selangor’s water restructuring deal with Putrajaya, the Kidex highway project, as well as issues of garbage collection, potholes and the increase of business license fees in the state, as its reasons for wanting the mentri besar replaced.
