Suspected of bribing Najib over Scorpene… French court investigation
Attached to this murky submarine story is the well-known shocking murder of the translator on the deal, Altantuya Shaariibuu (who had threatened to reveal information on those very kickbacks).
Najib was comprehensively demonstrated over the subsequent court proceeding as having been up to his eyes in a legal cover-up, revelations that ought to have ended the career of any politician.
Instead the blame has been put on the shoulders of two of his own bodyguards, who were instructed to kill Altantuya by someone still anonymous and who languish in jail facing sentence of death.
Too many followers – Najib lied about his role in Anwar’s conviction
Anwar
But, there is another more current and pressing scandal that Malaysians should no longer continue to tolerate now their Prime Minister has been demonstrated so comprehensively to be a major thief and liar. That, of course, is the continued incarceration of Malaysia’s opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, in a case that was cooked up by Najib from beginning to end.
The evidence is overwhelming that Malaysia’s present Prime Minister was up to his neck in the conspiracy to accuse the man who most threatened him politically of a crime designed to lose him the greatest possible political support.
And Najib has been caught out lying over and again over this involvement.
For this reason alone the plainly politically motivated prosecution ought to have been thrown out of court…. and indeed so it was. After a vicious and protracted trial Anwar was resoundingly acquitted in the High Court.
However, Najib was not prepared to accept an acquittal of his political enemy, particularly since Anwar had just won the majority of votes at the General Election. Najib ordered an Appeal against that acquittal and then he ordered a conviction – the hand-picked judiciary at the top of Malaysia’s eroded judicial system complied with this irregular request, a sad indicator of the country’s institutional decline.
Najib changed his story, not once but twice
Months and years of dragged out legal wrangling have conveniently blurred memories and confused foreign observers of the case, for Najib. However, it has been firmly established that Najib himself met the ‘victim’ at his house shortly before the complaint of sodomy was filed in June 2008, just after Anwar had caused shock waves with a landslide towards the opposition in the March election.
At first the Prime Minister lied and said he had not ever met the young worker from Anwar’s office. But, when a photograph appeared showing the man inside Najib’s home he changed his story and explained that Mohd Saiful had pitched up three months earlier to talk about student grants (as one does with the then deputy Prime Minister).
In fact Saiful was already a student drop-out, although he had been active in BN while at college before applying to join Anwar’s team just before the March election.
It was only after Saiful admitted under court questioning that he had discussed the issue of alleged sodomy with Najib in his house in June, just a two days before the alleged incident, that the DPM changed his story for a third time and admitted that he had indeed discussed the matter with Saiful and that yes, the lawyer and later prosecutor on the case Shafee Abdullah was also in the house at the time.
Najib acknowledged in this third version of events that he had advised Saiful to go and lodge a police report.
Saiful also admitted under further questioning that the day before the alleged incident he had also held a secret meeting with a police chief in the Concord Hotel in KL. Assistant Commissioner Rodwan Mohd Yusof had a long grudge against Anwar, who accused him of framing him during his previous arrest and imprisonment. Again the case was not thrown out.
Even so, it was two days after his visit to Anwar’s house and the alleged incident took place that Saiful took himself first to a private clinic to complain of sodomy. The doctor could find no evidence of interference, but when Saiful complained there had been crime involved the doctor sent him for full examination at a public hospital.
The doctors at the public hospital could find no evidence of any interference either, as would have been expected, but since Saiful claimed he had not washed or defecated in the two days since the alleged incident they took sample to check for DNA.
There was great mystery and confusion over what happened next as delay in the arrival and analysis of these samples appears to have occurred, according to Australian barrister Mark Trowell who has written about what he describes as a travesty of a legal case. The prosecution refused to provide details about how they acquired and processed their ‘evidence’.
The entire case was conducted against a backdrop of politicking and further accusations of a sexual nature against Anwar by BN, this time allegedly involving a female prostitute and a video without a properly identifiable face.
Unsurprisingly, after months of this nonsense the High Court Judge through out the prosecution and acquitted Anwar. In any normal country that would have been the end of the matter, as the process of appeal is reserved for the defendant and not the prosecutor, who has failed to prove his case to the judge and jury (sadly the latter institution was abolished in Malaysia).
But, in Malaysia no. Najib was by this time Prime Minister and he drove through an appeal by the prosecution to the higher courts, where BN have control over top appointments. Over the next two years and in the aftermath of a triumphant 2013 election result by Anwar Najib got the judges of the Federal Court to present the judgement he was after – a guilty verdict that would force his foe from politics.
That night a sick and sickened pilot drove his plane out over the Indian Ocean and ditched it in – Najib should take his share of the blame for that as well.
Are Malaysians to sit an tolerate a situation where a disgraced thief and liar has succeeded in driving the opposition leader into jail in a case he masterminded himself from start to finish? To be even more sure of controlling the case, the self-same Shafee Abdullah, Najib’s close legal associate, who attended that first meeting with the ‘victim to be’ in Najib’s house, unaccountably replaced the normal prosecution barristers on the case as a private prosecutor hired by the government during the final appeal hearings.
Najib has worked to exploit the leaderless situation confronting the opposition ever since and BN/UMNO smugly talk of divisions faced by the party they deliberately decapitated. He has gone on to “woo” the PAS Islamic party away from the opposition coalition in the normal way he woos – RM90 million is widely reckoned to have flowed into the top echelons of PAS in recent months (BN veterans would tell them they came cheap).
To sugar matters further for PAS, Najib has gone on a crusade to show himself ‘more holy than thou’ on every PAS religious agenda, stirring up extremism in Malaysia and undermining civil law and institutions, without turning a single hair over the destabilising, divisive and dangerous consequences to his country and his own party.
He thinks it’s clever. If a man has no charisma to attract his followers he buys them, whatever it takes.
Najib’s next target it the other powerful centre of political opposition, which is the well-run DAP party, which enjoys a strong support for its reputation for integrity. The Prime Minister has adopted his preferred technique of legal persecution, abusing all his powers to accuse DAP’s leader of the crime with which he himself is most associated, corruption.
Malaysia now faces the spectacle of their own most corrupted world leader, caught out stealing billions, going after a state leader over paltry and flimsy accusations of an alleged cheap deal to buy his modest house.
With Guan Eng in jail alongside Anwar, PAS on the pay-roll, all his critics sacked and his emergency powers in place, Najib plainly reckons he can pull off another “election win”.
Can Malaysians tolerate more of this and more graft and squander by his pumped up, hormone abusing wife?
No wonder Najib’s own family, his former patron Dr Mahathir and so many others from his own BN party (none saints themselves) have fallen away in shock and disgust from this man supposedly ‘born to lead’. They know him best.
Malaysians should team up to reject Najib. Next they can fight for reform.
