Mahathir and Daim should not politicise their crime
But now the game has changed. This is no longer about ‘normal’ business losses or about being stupid. This time a real crime has been committed and it can be proven. So Mahathir and Daim are going to pay for that crime. And this is what Mahathir is trying to avoid: avoid being called a criminal and instead be called a freedom-fighter who is a victim of politically-motivated persecution.
THE CORRIDORS OF POWER
Raja Petra Kamarudin
Today, The Star reported Lim Sian See as saying that three crimes have been committed in the US10 billion Bank Negara Malaysia forex fiasco (SEE BELOW). First is losing US$10 billion gambling on the forex market. Second is lying to the Cabinet by saying that the loss was only RM5.7 billion and is merely ‘deferred expenditure’ and ‘unrealised losses’. Third is lying to Parliament, first by denying the whole thing and calling it opposition lies and propaganda, and a year later by saying that it was a very small ‘paper loss’ and not actual money paid out.
READ MORE HERE: Mahathir and Daim lied about the forex losses
The fact that Bank Negara lost US10 billion and that they lied about it both to the Cabinet and to Parliament cannot be denied because there are documents to prove this. What the Royal Commission of Inquiry (RCI) now needs to establish is whether the entire US10 billion was lost gambling on the forex market or whether a large portion of that money was actually siphoned out and disguised as ‘normal’ forex losses.
Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad, Nor Mohamed Yakcop and Tun Daim Zainuddin cost Malaysia the equivalent of RM99 billion today
And this is what Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad, Tun Daim Zainuddin and Nor Mohamed Yakcop fear the most. Mahathir has lost money before, estimated at RM200 billion or so. But so far Mahathir has justified this loss as ‘normal’. When you invest or do business the risk of losses is always there. It could be stupidity or a miscalculation or events beyond your control or someone cheated you. But that does not make you a criminal. This time, however, it is going to be proven that Mahathir, Daim and Nor Mohamed committed a crime and they are going to have to face the consequences of that crime they committed.
READ MORE HERE: Mahathir’s money-laundering operation
Mahathir knows he needs to preempt this eventuality. So he flew to the UK over Hari Raya to meet Clare Rewcastle Brown to see how Sarawak Report can help him. Clare’s advise was: the first thing Mahathir needs to do is to warn Malaysians that Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak intends to arrest the opposition leaders just before the next general election. Then, when they do arrest Mahathir, he can allege that it is politically-motivated and claim the title of ‘Prisoner of Conscience’.
Nor Mohamed Yakcop and George Soros planning how to gamble on the forex market
The next thing would be for Sarawak Report to come out with daily reports regarding 1MDB, the DoJ, etc., to distract Malaysians from the RCI and The Great Bank Negara US10 billion Robbery. Sarawak Report will shout and scream and try to drown out whatever noise regarding the RCI and The Great Bank Negara US10 billion Robbery. All that, in fact, has already started.
Lim Kit Siang, on the other hand, will question the Special Task Force and demand that their findings be made public to raise doubts on the whole matter so that later they can allege that the RCI is flawed. Kit Siang will also demand that a RCI for 1MDB be held. Kit Siang does not seem to realise how stupid he sounds when the government invested only RM1 million in 1MDB and that equity is still there listed in the books and has not been lost or wiped out.
Lim Kit Siang needs to go back to school to learn bookkeeping and understand that the government’s equity in 1MDB is only RM1 million and the money is still there and has not been lost
Then Mahathir has to play up his health issue. In the event they arrest him, put him on trial, and convict him, he can claim ill-health and get his prison term changed to house arrest. Mahathir will be seen as too sick to be stuffed into jail and if they do put him in jail he is going to die. So, on compassionate grounds, he will be put under house arrest instead.
But that is not how Mahathir would like to spend the rest of his life — as a convicted criminal who stole billions of the nation’s money — never mind whether he spends his remaining days in jail or under house arrest. So he is trying to turn this whole thing into a political issue, just like what Anwar Ibrahim did and is still doing.
Anwar is not guilty of sodomy. He is guilty of opposing the Prime Minister. So Mahathir, too, is not guilty of robbing Bank Negara. He is guilty of opposing the Prime Minister. Anwar was trying to ‘save Malaysia’, and Mahathir, too, is trying to ‘save Malaysia’. Anwar is a ‘Prisoner of Conscience’, and so is Mahathir.
READ MORE HERE: Shaken Mahathir confesses guilt to Clare Brown
That is what Mahathir’s and Daim’s game plan is. They are trying to politicise their crime and turn the whole thing into a political issue. They are not criminals. They are victims of political persecution. They are heroes who are fighting for Malaysians, not zeros who robbed the country.
The forex scandal is not just the end of Mahathir, Daim and Nor Mohamed but PPBM, and by extension Pakatan Harapan, will be finished as well
Even more worrying would be if the RCI traces the so-called ‘forex losses’ back to Mahathir’s and his family’s 480 companies. How did they become billionaires in no time at all while others took two generations or more to achieve that? You cannot become a billionaire in just five years when others need 50 years unless there is an element of a crime. And there is a danger the RCI will find some of that so-called ‘forex losses’ in those 480 companies.
Clare has become Mahathir’s strategic adviser and planner and Sarawak Report is now his most important political vehicle. The sole job of Clare and Sarawak Report is to serve Mahathir. The fact that Mahathir is putting RM50 million on Clare and Sarawak Report shows how desperate he has become. If Clare and Sarawak Report are really that good Barisan Nasional would have been ousted from Sarawak back in 2011 — which was why Sarawak Report was set up in the first place — while Najib would have been ousted two years ago in 2015.
But then Mahathir has nothing left in which to use to save himself. He knows the game is up and it is merely a matter of when and not if he is going to jail. He is going to crash so he is looking for the softest crash-landing possible so that he can still walk away with injuries but not face death. But that may be impossible now that the window of redemption has closed and has been locked tight. Mahathir is sitting in death row a dead man walking and the faster he accepts this reality the better he can sleep at night.
This message from DAP’s Chinese supporter says it all
Mahathir was once asked during an interview he gave, “How would you like to be remembered?” Mahathir’s reply was he does not care how he is remembered. That is actually one more lie amongst many lies that has come out of Mahathir’s mouth since he first became famous, or infamous, in 1969 when he attacked Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman for being a ‘Chinese-lover’.
Mahathir does care how he is remembered. He wants to be remembered as Malaysia’s Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the Father of Modern Malaysia. That is what his Wawasan 2020, Look East Policy, Malaysia Incorporated, Putrajaya, Langkawi, KLCC, KLIA, Proton, Perwaja, Bakun Dam, and many more are all about. They are all monuments of Mahathir’s so-called ‘success’. They are all legacies of Mahathir for future generations of Malaysians to admire in awe like those who converge on the Pyramids and Sphinxes left behind by Egypt’s Pharaohs.
What Mahathir does not want to be remembered for is the RM200 billion all his wild ideas cost Malaysia in his 22 years of running the country — or for stealing US10 billion of Bank Negara’s money. He does not want to be remembered for his adventures, or rather misadventures, in trying to corner the tin market, in gambling on the forex market, in wasting billions trying to build a Malaysia-made Japanese car, in bankrupting Malaysia Airlines, in embarking on steel manufacturing after his brother-in-law, the then Bank Negara Governor, warned him against it.
Barry Wain says Mahathir wasted RM100 billion of the nation’s money
Barry Wain listed down Mahathir’s fiascos and estimated it to have cost Malaysia RM100 billion. Edmund Terence Gomez and Jomo Kwame Sundaram, on the other hand, added another RM100 billion to the list in companies, contracts, concessions and businesses which were alleged to have gone to Umno but were parked under the names of three trustees, Mahathir and Daim being two of those three.
Needless to say, that RM100 billion does not appear in Umno’s books and, to quote Mahathir, appears to have ‘disappeared into thin air’. It can only be assumed that the Umno trustees are still holding that RM100 billion under ‘trust’. When Mahathir and Daim, and whoever that third trustee is, are going to hand Umno back the RM100 billion that is supposed to belong to the party is a mystery that will never be known in our lifetime — just like how the whereabouts of Yamashita’s gold is still a mystery till today even after 72 years.
Jomo Sundaram says Mahathir used Umno as a front to steal RM100 billion while Daim stole another RM60 billion
But that is not what concerns Mahathir and Daim and which keeps them awake at night. Mahathir can handle that and has, in fact, already said many times that he has never been charged for any crime, there is no evidence he has committed a crime, losing money is part of doing business and is considered normal, and so on.
As they say, you cannot be sent to jail for stupidity. And at worst that is all Mahathir is guilty of: being stupid for losing so much money. But now the game has changed. This is no longer about ‘normal’ business losses or about being stupid. This time a real crime has been committed and it can be proven. So Mahathir and Daim are going to pay for that crime. And this is what Mahathir is trying to avoid: avoid being called a criminal and instead be called a freedom-fighter who is a victim of politically-motivated persecution.
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Three crimes may have been committed in Bank Negara forex scandal, says blogger
(The Star) – Three crimes may have been committed in the Bank Negara forex scandal of the 1980s and 1990s, claimed political blogger Lim Sian See.
Lim said the first crime is that Bank Negara suffered US$10 billion (RM42.94 billion) in foreign exchange market losses.
However, the Royal Commission of Inquiry (RCI) would have to determine whether this was due to gambling or money siphoned out via lop-sided trade.
He said that the second crime was that the Cabinet may have been misled on the amount of the losses. The RCI, he said, would have access to classified Cabinet papers to prove it was informed that the loss was just RM5.7 billion, when actually it was US$10 billion.
“On top of that, they told the Cabinet that the loss was only ‘deferred expenditure’ and ‘unrealised losses’,” he said.
The third crime, Lim said, was that Parliament was misled about the losses.
He said that in 1993, Parliament was told that the story of Bank Negara losing a lot of money gambling on the forex market was a lie and mere opposition propaganda.
Then in 1994, he said, Parliament was told that Bank Negara had, indeed, lost money gambling on the forex market but that it was “just a small loss and a paper loss on top of that” and that “no money was actually paid out”.
The crimes, the political blogger said, had already happened and the RCI’s job is to gather the evidence officially.
He said the crimes had led to RM100 billion losses to the country, which is never likely to be recovered.
“As Lim Kit Siang had once pointed out, the scale of the gambling exposure at five times our reserves and two times our GDP then could have bankrupted Malaysia many times over should the gambling bets had gone horribly wrong,” he said.
Lim added that Bank Negara was also severely weakened due to its depleted reserves, and this had indirectly led to the severe impact felt during the 1997-1998 economic crisis.
The Government agreed last week to form an RCI to investigate the losses.
It said that preliminary findings by the special task force, which was set up in February to look into the matter, showed that the actual losses were greater than what was reported to the Cabinet and Parliament at the time.
Bank Negara has said that it will fully cooperate in providing information as required by the law to the RCI in its investigation.
