It was NOT USD700 million, it was USD1 billion

By MT Webmaster Last updated Sep 9, 2015

If you control the political funding then you control the Prime Minister. And Najib did not like that arrangement one bit. So he got certain Middle Eastern friends to help him out and they did. They gave him USD1 billion. And with that USD1 billion Najib could afford to tell Dr Mahathir to take a walk, which he did last weekend during the Bersih rally.

THE CORRIDORS OF POWER

Raja Petra Kamarudin

There appears to be still a lot of talk regarding the USD700 million or RM2.6 billion that allegedly went into Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak’s bank account. It seems people in the know are convinced that a crime has somehow been committed although they are not quite sure in what way the crime may have been committed.

Initially, these people in the know said that the RM2.6 billion came from 1MDB. MACC then investigated the allegation and found that the allegation was not true because 1MDB did not lose RM2.6 billion in cash and no amount of RM2.6 billion was transferred from 1MDB to Najib’s personal back account.

Well, if these people in the know are really people in the know, then they would have known that the amount was NOT USD700 million or RM2.6 billion. It was USD1 billion or RM3.6 billion, or more than RM4.2 billion at today’s rate of exchange. So do these people in the know really know what happened like they say they do if they cannot even get the figure correct?

In the first place, how did this whole thing start? The people in the know do not tell us because they are not really people in the know so they do not know the real story. And the story goes back farther than just to 2013 when the transaction was supposed to have taken place. It goes back even earlier, ten years earlier to be exact, to 2003.

When Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad handed power to Tun Abdullah Ahmad Badawi on 1st November 2003, Dr Mahathir also gave Abdullah RM1.4 billion to finance his political activities, the general election included four months later in March 2004.

So, if anyone wants to scream that election laws have been violated, then they would have already been violated back in 2004. In fact, you could even allege that they were broken even earlier than that since the 1980s. So it makes it very difficult for a rapist to scream rape.

Of course, Abdullah, and his son-in-law, Khairy Jamaluddin, were not too happy with the arrangement. First of all, why is Dr Mahathir giving just RM1.4 billion, they argued, when the Old Man is trustee to much more than that, estimated at anything between RM100 billion to RM200 billion? The fact that they do not even know the real figure because Umno’s wealth has been parked under proxies makes it even more dodgy.

Secondly, and more upsetting, is the fact that Dr Mahathir still wants to control the funding instead of handing over Umno’s assets to the new Prime Minister. And the funding that Dr Mahathir gives comes with strings attached. Dr Mahathir will call the shots and the Prime Minister will have to dance to his tune.

Abdullah and Khairy decided that once is enough. They depended on Dr Mahathir in 2003 and the demands were just not worth it. So Abdullah and Khairy began to build up their own war chest so that in the next general election expected at the very latest in 2009 they would no longer need to depend on Dr Mahathir.

And this is when people like Kamal, Kalimullah, Patrick Lim and a few others came in. They were supposed to build up this war chest and when Dr Mahathir discovered that they were beginning to break away he launched his attack. Dr Mahathir knew that if they managed to build up their own war chest and no longer depended on him then he would not be able to control them.

And that was when Abdullah’s, Khairy’s, Kamal’s, Patrick’s, etc., problems began that saw a change of Prime Minister three years later.

Then it came to Najib’s turn. When he took over as Prime Minister in 2009, Dr Mahathir agreed to give him RM2.5 billion to finance his political activities. And, just like in the case of Abdullah and the RM1.4 billion six years before that, it came with plenty of strings attached. Basically, just like what happened to Abdullah, Dr Mahathir would call the shots and the Prime Minister must dance to his tune.

But Najib did not agree to the terms. He opined that he would be making a pact with the devil and once made the devil would own your soul. So Najib decided to arrange his own political funding rather than depend on Dr Mahathir. And why should he accept the RM2.5 billion from Dr Mahathir when the figure should be anything between RM100 billion and RM200 billion, the wealth that Umno really owns?

Of course, Dr Mahathir was not happy with a Prime Minister who did not need his funding and who had the ability to raise USD1 billion on his own. So Dr Mahathir had to ‘expose’ Najib so that he could no longer get financial support from his Middle Eastern friends. And if Najib wanted funding then he would have to go back to Dr Mahathir and make a deal. And the deal would be on Dr Mahathir’s terms.

The rest of the story is already public knowledge. The question that is being asked is how much money was involved, where did it come from, how was it spent, and what happened to the balance that was unspent? Well, what was unspent has been returned to sender. As for where the money came from and how it was spent, did Abdullah have to declare his political finding in 2004 and 2008 with details of where the money came from and how it was spent?

For that matter, none of the political funding over the last 30 years or so since 1982 has even been declared with details of where the money came from and how the money was spent. So why should Najib do what the Prime Ministers before him did not have to do?

Raja Petra Kamarudin RPK