Is this what Mahathir needs RM5 billion for?
The Third Force
For the past week or so, I’ve been writing a series of articles to expose secrets that the DAP secretary-general, Lim Guan Eng, kept hidden in his crib all this while. As I go on, we will discover why the party is at the verge of breaking apart at the seams and why it is inevitable that its Central Executive Committee (CEC) strips Guan Eng off his titles, including that of Chief Minister.
However, today, I’m going to talk about former premier Dr. Mahathir Mohammad and the five billion ringgit that he has credited to his cause of destroying Barisan Nasional, and not to mention, to finance his new platform, Parti Pribumi Bersatu Malaysia (Bersatu).
Now, we’re talking about five billion here, which does not include the RM2 billion that Tan Sri T. Ananda Krishnan, Tan Sri Dato’ Dr. Francis Yeoh, Dato’ Justin Leong and Dato’ Seri Robin Tan Yeong Ching pledged to him in December 2014. That money has since been expended to wage a war of perception against the Prime Minister Dato’ Seri Najib Tun Razak and to grease the palms of certain politicians.
Rather, this is an extra five billion he negotiated in a span of six to seven months beginning December last year, almost a fifth of which is said to have been spent to step up the assaults against Najib in the world media.
Tell me, do you know what having five billion is like? That’s five with nine zeros attached, which really is a lot of money. In the US, they occasionally refer to a billion as “a thousand million.” So basically, we’re talking about “five thousand million,” or five million repeated a thousand times.
As Raja Petra Kamarudin (RPK) has repeatedly been pointing out, it costs the ruling coalition an estimated RM1.5 billion to bankroll an election. At least, that was the approximate cost towards the later part of Mahathir’s reign as Prime Minister. Today, it is said to cost nearly RM2-2.5 billion to finance a general election.
For the sake of discussion, let’s just assume that it would cost Barisan Nasional RM2 billion to fund the 14th general election. For Bersatu to launch an election campaign commensurate to and of a class with the ruling coalition, it would have to spend an equal sum of money to grease its electoral machinery and fund its various activities. Assuming Mahathir does, and I’m sure he would, stock his party’s war chest with two billion ringgit, he would be left with a three billion ringgit voucher to his credit.
But lest we forget, he has spent almost a billion since December last year to roast Najib and his family under the high intensity beams of the media spotlight. If we were to round that figure up to a billion, Mahathir would have left a two billion ringgit voucher to finance a war of perception against Barisan Nasional until the next general election.
However, the 13th Malaysian Parliament is due for dissolution only in 2018. Based on his ‘spending patterns’, it is unlikely that he would have settled for RM2 billion to finance a 20-month mudslinging campaign – it wouldn’t suffice. And that brings us to the question – why did Mahathir negotiate for so ‘little’ an amount so soon?
Now, if you’d recall, on the 21st of last month, I wrote an article titled Mahathir wants Najib brought down before April next year (refer http://www.malaysia-today.net/mahathir-wants-najib-brought-down-before-april-next-year/). And this is true – every other manoeuvre that Mahathir had contrived since September last year was nothing but theatrics, meant to convince the people that he had done his best to ‘save’ Malaysia but failed. The mission had all along been to tell the people that ‘the only option left’ was for him to set up a new party and a Third Force to destroy Barisan Nasional come the next election.
But the idea of setting up of the Third Force was not his. It spawned off a discussion that took place between him and Dato’ Seri Azmin Ali in August 2015. A third person who attended the meeting, a Tan Sri, opined that Najib could never be brought down through democratic thievery, as many in UMNO were well aware that it was he (Mahathir) who had sabotaged 1MDB.
As a matter of fact, RPK took the wraps off the sabotage in an article that was carried by Malaysia Today yesterday, which you can read all about by following this link:
http://www.malaysia-today.net/how-mahathir-used-bank-negara-to-sabotage-1mdb/
The third Tan Sri then came to the conclusion that the only way to topple Najib would be to launch a campaign to ‘save’ Malaysia in stages, to a point that Najib’s name would be so black, it wouldn’t matter if he were innocent or guilty. The meeting agreed that the mission was to convince the people Najib was just no good for Malaysia.
It was then that the idea of launching a Third Force by September this year cropped up. September was also the deadline the meeting had set to launch Mahathir’s new party and for Azmin to sweep both Datin Seri Dr Wan Azizah and Nurul Izzah out from PKR together with the trash.
So you see, it wasn’t Mahathir who came up with the idea of ‘saving’ Malaysia. That honour goes to a certain Tan Sri who had attended the meeting, who incidentally had also expressed why it was absolutely necessary for UMNO to be destroyed. And just so that you know, that Tan Sri wasn’t Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin.
According to the Tan Sri, the only hurdle was Malaysia Today, which seemed to have its tentacles lodged in every lubang cacing in Malaysia. The Tan Sri warned the meeting that RPK was ‘training’ a very potent writer who would one day pose a threat to the Third Force ambition and would muddle plans to topple Najib. Anyway, the meeting resolved to pressure Najib into triggering a snap election by March 2017.
Around then, I got word of this secret meeting through a group that happened to have its tentacles lodged in Azmin’s innermost circles. Now, it’s a long story how I got to know of this meeting to the minute detail. Perhaps, I’ll tell you that story at another time when opportunity serves me best. For now, let’s just stick to the fact that the events you’ve been witnessing these past few months were planned in August 2015.
As soon as I got to know of Mahathir’s Third Force ambition, I began to sign off as The Third Force in all my articles, starting with one I wrote on the 14th of August 2015. The first article I wrote as The Third Force, knowing well in advance that they were about to target RPK, was titled The Torture of Raja Petra Kamarudin. Rumour is, both Mahathir and the Tan Sri got pissed and decided that something needed to be done. They knew they’d been upstaged, and they knew who I was and how to reach me.
So it is a little more than a coincidence that eight days later, I was invited to a meeting in Kuala Lumpur by a friend who happened to be the nephew of a certain Tan Sri. The meeting was attended by two other persons, including one who is seen writing occasionally for Free Malaysia Today. We were at this Tan Sri’s nephew’s residence for almost six hours discussing – and get ready for this – how to ‘save’ Malaysia.
That’s right. ‘Saving’ Malaysia was a proposition that was discussed for the second time at a roundtable in Kuala Lumpur where I was apparently ‘the guest of honour’. The proposal was brought up by the Tan Sri’s nephew who to this day seems to have some bad blood with RPK. As a matter of fact, the nephew, a Dato’ himself, had tried to convince me that RPK would do anything for money and was an opportunist.
The Tan Sri’s nephew knew well in advance that I hated Mahathir. So throughout the meeting, everyone seemed careful to ‘announce’ that they too hated Mahathir. But here’s the thing – they seemed to hate Najib as well. The only person they sang praises of was Tengku Tan Sri Razaleigh Hamzah.
Anyway, we began discussing the direction the country was headed. At one point, the Tan Sri’s nephew asked me if I was privy to information that proved Najib had embezzled funds from 1MDB. He was referring to some twisted version of what RPK had written yesterday, which you can read all about by tracing the link I provided above.
Moving on, I told the Tan Sri I was aware of stories linking Najib and Rosmah with 1MDB, but chose not to believe any of them. What I was careful not to state was the element of sabotage that Mahathir had perpetrated. You see, one way to get people to talk is to read your audience, find their weaknesses, and tell them everything you think they want to hear. Throughout the meeting, I acted so dumb that the Tan Sri’s nephew kept driving home the point that Najib and Rosmah were crooks.
Come to think of it, a lot of was discussed in those six hours. What caught my attention most was the mention of Mahathir’s new party and The Third Force, which I had already come to know of. As a matter of fact, they touched on several ‘sticky’ issues that are beyond the scope of this article. Furthermore, I promised them never to speak of those issues in public.
But here’s the thing – to me, a promise can be broken if it serves to the interest of National Security. And that explains why I am spilling a lot of detail here. As a matter of fact, it was me who did most of the talking that day, and it was I who said, “Everything discussed here will never leave the table, I promise you guys that.”
That said, midway through the meeting, I asked the Tan Sri’s nephew who he intended to ‘save’ Malaysia from.
“Let’s assume that Najib resigns tomorrow. Just who do you have in mind as the next PM? Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah?”
I never got a clear reply.
What was clear, they wanted me to write articles proposing that our electoral system be revamped to match that of the United States. And that got me thinking – either they took me for an idiot or were themselves idiots. As it seems, they may have wanted to ruin my reputation as The Third Force. Immediately, I realised that it may have been Mahathir who put the Tan Sri and his nephew up to it. After all, I’m quite sure that Mahathir did recently send someone to offer me RM5 million to write against RPK and Najib. But I’ll talk about that in another article.
Coming back to the Tan Sri’s nephew, I tossed the ball back to his court. This is what I said:
“I agree. Our system needs revamping. It’s a fooked up system. However, someone needs to set the ball rolling. That way, I can follow suit with articles to convince Malaysians that our system is flawed. So perhaps Aspan can come up with some ideas.”
Yes. The other person who attended the 22nd of August meeting was none other than Aspan Alias.
However, every attempt I made to get in touch with Aspan thereafter was futile. Neither did he write anything to the effect of what we had discussed during the six hour meeting, nor was there ever a follow up to that meeting. While the Tan Sri’s nephew and I have been friends for almost three years and do communicate from time to time, he has never spoken of ‘saving Malaysia’ to me since.
There is a point to all this.
Contrary to what you may think, Mahathir’s ‘save’ Malaysia campaign and plans to set up a new party was triggered in August of last year as a long range program towards plunging the nation into chaos. Part of the idea was further propagated at a roundtable by the Tan Sri’s nephew on the 22nd of August 2015. You can trust me on this.
The collective mission, I believe, is for Mahathir to wage a fierce and ‘bloody’ onslaught assault as never seen before against Barisan Nasional beginning the month of October this year. For this plan to work, Mahathir has been building a shadow movement within UMNO that appears to be supportive of Najib but will attempt to sabotage the party machinery during polls. I was told that the movement had attempted to sabotage UMNO during the Sungaii Besar and Kuala Kangsar twin by-election.
Mahathir has charted on the calendar a five month assault on the ruling coalition that he hopes will plunge the nation into polls by March next year. And that explains why Mahathir negotiated an extra two billion from a certain Tan Sri so soon.
Stick around guys. I’ll be back with more on Guan Eng soon.
