Four tops in a danse macabre?
Ishmael Lim, FMT
It is hardly surprising that Anwar Ibrahim has been willing to step up to bowl, if MACC is willing to bat, over allegations concerning Daim Zainuddin. There is no love lost between the two former Finance Ministers; Anwar campaigned in 2008 to recoup the purported billions swiped from the country’s coffers under the financial stewardship of Daim.
Can there now be a nexus between Najib Razak and Anwar all of a sudden, just because Najib’s former aide Ariff Sabri says so?
People should bear in mind that Daim and Ariff have been acquainted for a long time, and Ariff Sabri became well-known for his insider tales and political punditry through the “Oracle of Syed Putra”, a name he coined for Daim’s alter ego or go-between, who regularly fed choice morsels of gossip and prophecies as ammunition for Ariff’s Sakmongkol AK47 blog.
Certainly he would lend a hand to a friend in need, what are friends for, after all: without Daim, Sakmongkol’s AK47 might have been firing blanks.
Anwar, being Anwar, has little to lose: every day that he remains out of prison is another day in paradise, another day to dish it back to those who cast him out into the wilderness.
It is not impossible that desperate men might resort to desperate measures but it might be too much in the way of conjecture to trace a line between Anwar and the Prime Minister. A more likely scenario would be that Anwar and PKR have long been keen to throw a log on this bonfire and no one is now barring their way. Neither is anyone offering Anwar any matches: Anwar comes with a box of his own.
What is curious is not that Anwar is willing to tell what he knows but that MACC is even showing an interest in a bigwig like Daim.
It is no secret that Daim ruffled feathers in the highest places in recent months, a crescendo reaching an apex of sorts for the wily old fox. They say that the good you do comes back to you, but the evil that you do stays with you — so his famous political craft has come back to annoy him like a boomerang. Or perhaps the boomerang had been in his pocket all the while.
