Mahathir using stolen Forex money to finance Pakatan

Mahathir has agreed to finance Pakatan Harapan RM3 billion for the next general election to get them to agree to register the coalition and come out with a common logo and a joint-election manifesto. But there is another reason for the RM3 billion. That RM3 billion is part of the stolen Forex money and Mahathir wants to stuff Kit Siang’s mouth with it to buy his silence.

PAKATAN’S GAME OF THRONES

Raja Petra Kamarudin

For months since PPBM a.k.a. Pribumi was launched the opposition coalition was being touted as Pribumi-Pakatan Harapan. Now, finally, Pakatan Harapan has agreed to admit Pribumi into the opposition coalition. So now it is no longer Pribumi-Pakatan Harapan but a Pakatan Harapan coalition of four parties: DAP, PKR, Pribumi and PAN.

However, Mahathir does not want Pribumi to be an official member of Pakatan Harapan unless the coalition is legally registered, with him as the Chairman, and unless all the member parties contest the coming general election under one name with one flag and one logo. Mahathir wants Pakatan Harapan to be a duplicate of Barisan Nasional where all parties in the coalition contest the elections under Barisan Nasional and not under their individual parties. Mahathir feels this is the only way the opposition coalition can win more than just 70 parliament seats.

Pakatan Harapan has agreed to legally register the coalition and come out with a common logo and joint-election manifesto as Mahathir wants

On 20th March 2017, Pakatan Harapan announced that they have agreed to legally register the coalition and come out with a common logo and a joint-election manifesto, as what Mahathir wants. Mahathir, in turn, agreed to come out with the RM3 billion that the opposition needs to finance the next general election.

When the issue of the RM2.6 billion donation that Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak received from Arab sources first surfaced, Mahathir said RM2.6 billion is too much. Mahathir revealed that when he was Prime Minister he only needed RM1.5 billion to finance the elections (which everyone already knew long ago). That means more than RM1 billion has been hijacked and Mahathir wanted to know what happened to that money.

Now Mahathir has to eat his words. RM1.5 billion is not enough and he actually needs to come out with RM3 billion to finance Pakatan Harapan. In short, Mahathir is confirming that RM2.6 billion is not really too much and is about the correct figure to finance the general election since he, too, has to come out with RM3 billion to finance Pakatan Harapan.

Mahathir has to shut Kit Siang’s mouth by stuffing it with money

But Mahathir has more than one reason for agreeing to finance Pakatan Harapan to the tune of RM3 billion. One, of course, is to get Pakatan Harapan to agree to legally register the opposition coalition and come out with a common logo and a joint-election manifesto. The second is to make sure that Kit Siang does not cooperate with or testify before the Royal Commission of Inquiry (RCI) that is going to be set up to investigate the US$10 billion Forex losses from 1988 to 1994.

Kit Siang has all the evidence pertaining to this scandal, and if he testifies before the RCI and presents the evidence, Mahathir is a dead man walking. And Kit Siang has already revealed in the past that he has all the evidence and that if the opposition ever came to power he would make sure that Mahathir is arrested and is sent to jail for the rest of his life.

And this is Mahathir’s greatest fear. He needs to silence Kit Siang by stuffing his mouth with money. And Mahathir is going use part of that money he stole from Bank Negara under the disguise of ‘Forex losses’ to stuff Kit Siang’s mouth. And once Kit Siang’s mouth is stuffed with stolen money he would be the last person on earth to finger Mahathir for stealing billions from Bank Negara through the Forex dealings of 1988-1994.

DAP is pretending they need to raise funds to finance the coming general election whereas they already have RM3 billion from Mahathir, not to mention the RM1.5 billion from Israel they received earlier

In short, Mahathir is buying Kit Siang’s silence. As a bonus, Mahathir gets to be the Chairman of a legally registered coalition. Pakatan Harapan’s image would then change from a DAP-led coalition to a Pribumi-led coalition and it can shed its Ali Baba identity. Mahathir hopes this would then win over more Malays. And this works for Kit Siang as well because then DAP needs not bring out the RM1.5 billion it received from Israel and risk proving the allegation of where DAP’s source of funding comes from.

But Mahathir is not totally in the clear yet. While Pakatan Harapan may have agreed to register the coalition and come out with a common logo and a joint-election manifesto, that does not mean DAP cannot still come out with its own (separate) election manifesto, like last time, (or even separate election manifestos for each state) and contest the election under its own DAP banner — which means it would defeat the whole purpose of this exercise.

DAP is still leaving the door open and its ‘rocket’ is not going to be buried just yet. DAP knows that the Chinese voters are guaranteed to vote ‘rocket’ but there is no guarantee that they would vote for something else. So DAP stands to lose a lot by discarding its ‘rocket’.

The Chinese identify with the rocket and anything else will cost DAP a lot of votes

Kit Siang wants Mahathir to deliver the RM3 billion first before DAP will make the final decision and close the door on the ‘rocket’. Until then the door remains open. Promising RM3 billion is one thing. But as long as the RM3 billion is not yet in your pocket then anything can happen along the way. After all, Mahathir has been making so many U-turns of late that you never know what he is going to decide tomorrow.

So it is a stalemate at the moment. Mahathir wants a legally registered coalition and a common flag and logo and a joint-election manifesto. He also wants all parties to contest the next general election under the common name and not under their individual party names. Anthony Loke Siew Fook said this is not yet final. And it will become final only when Mahathir delivers the RM3 billion funding.

Mahathir has no choice but to deliver the RM3 billion because he needs to buy Kit Siang’s silence. If Kit Siang sings during the Forex RCI then Mahathir is dead meat. But whether he delivers the money now or closer to the general election is a decision he now has to make. The RCI may soon be meeting and if Mahathir cannot silence Kit Siang then the future will be very bleak indeed. Mahathir is swinging on Kit Siang’s hook and he has to break free from Kit Siang’s grasp.

Kit Siang lost his cool when asked about his current stand regarding the Forex scandal

When asked by the reporters regarding his current stand on the Forex scandal, Kit Siang blew his top and shouted that his stand still remains the same. Kit Siang said he still wants to see those who caused this US10 billion loss to be investigated and punished. And the scandal needs to be investigated by the RCI because a large chunk of that money was not ‘normal losses’ but was stolen behind the disguise of ‘Forex losses’.

If Mahathir’s role in this theft is revealed then he would be forced to return the money. And we are talking about US$10 billion here with a huge chunk of that actually stolen. So RM3 billion is a small price to pay to buy Kit Siang’s silence and at the same time get to become the Chairman of the legally registered Pakatan Harapan and get anointed as the Prime Minister-in-waiting.

So who said Lim Kit Siang and the DAP leaders are clean, saintly, incorruptible and cannot be bought? Kit Siang has proven that for the right price even he can be bought. And Mahathir, in turn, has learnt that when dealing with Kit Siang promises are not good enough. It has to be money upfront.