PETALING JAYA, Dec 16 — PKR’s Rafizi Ramli will seek help from Hong Kong’s graftbusters once again, this time over bribery allegations against Attorney-General (AG) Tan Sri Abdul Gani Patail which purportedly led to Malaysia losing its claim on Pulau Batu Puteh to Singapore in 2007.
Despite admitting that it would not be easy to implicate Gani, Rafizi hoped that the action will garner a response from Putrajaya, including suspending the AG pending the investigation.
“They have the authority and power to investigate any financial transactions into Hong Kong if there is reasonable ground to believe that the money was a part of corruption,
“We need to compile to provide some information to Hong Kong authority which we will do within the next few days. (Then), I will wait for their response.”
Rafizi, known as PKR’s “expose man” and the executive director for National Oversight and Whistleblowers Centre, has also set this Wednesday as the deadline to gather the information on Gani.
This will be Rafizi’s second report to the island’s Independent Commission Against Corruption, after the murky RM40 million “political donation” to Sabah Umno scandal back in November last year.
The move follows a revelation by former Kuala Lumpur Crime Investigation Department chief Datuk Mat Zain Ibrahim in his 31-page statutory declaration sent to the Prime Minister’s Office on October 9.
In it, Mat Zain also defended his earlier allegation that Abdul Gani had intentionally lost the territorial dispute case, which was heard at the International Court of Justice in 2007.
Mat Zain had quoted prominent Umno lawyer Tan Sri Muhammad Shafee Abdullah as saying “you will not believe your eyes if you were to see the amount of cash that was transferred into Gani’s account in Hong Kong.”
Shafee has since distanced himself from Mat Zain’s allegations, rejecting the remarks in his affidavit-in-reply for the government’s appeal against the sodomy acquittal of Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim last week.
Pulau Batu Puteh, or Pedra Branca as it is now known, was a disputed island claimed by Malaysia and Singapore since 1979, when Malaysia published a map indicating the island to be within the country’s territory.
This led to a nearly three-decade dispute with Singapore that was finally ended when the island was ruled to be Singaporean territory by the International Court of Justice in 2008.
