KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 15 - Datuk Seri Ahmad Zahid Hamidi should issue a ministerial statement in Parliament tomorrow on Paul Phua, Lim Kit Siang said today after the deputy prime minister’s name cropped up in ESPN’s report Friday on the life of the international gambling kingpin.
Lim said some months ago when reports revealed that Zahid had previously endorsed Phua in a letter to the US’s Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), some questions were left unanswered, like whether the federal Cabinet had accepted the minister’s explanation on the matter.
He said that after the Cabinet discussed the purported letter on January 14, several ministers who attended the discussion gave different versions of what transpired — one said Cabinet “accepted” Zahid’s explanation; another said Cabinet merely heard his explanation; and another claimed that the Cabinet was satisfied “in principle” with the explanation.
“Which was which?” Lim asked in a statement here.
“The whole Phua-Zahid episode has become very murky with conflicting accounts and explanations by different ministers, with no one taking full responsibility for any final version,” the Gelang Patah MP added.
Zahid entered the spotlight in January when the letter purportedly vouching for Phua surfaced during the latter’s trial in the United States where he was facing illegal gambling charges for taking bets during the football World Cup last summer.
In the letter, it was also stated that Phua had on numerous occasions assisted the Malaysian government on projects affecting the country’s national security.
Zahid’s letter to the FBI dated December 18, 2014, was reportedly withdrawn as evidence, however, after Putrajaya objected to it being made public.
On June 1, Phua walked free from the charges and went to the European country of Montenegro, where reportedly, his credit is still good.
According to reports, what eventually led a US district judge to throw out the case against the world’s biggest fish on gaming was a little slip-up by one of the FBI agents in Las Vegas, Minh Pham, who neglected to mention in his application for a warrant of arrest to a magistrate that he had deliberately cut the Internet line to the villa where Phua and his associates were operating on their biggest bet of the year.
ESPN revisited Phua's story in its 18-page investigative report published Friday and in it, the international sports agency said that the gambling kingpin, after he was arrested in the US last year, had many aces up his sleeves.
The report said that Phua called on those connections he had built over the years to hire a stellar legal team to defend and vouch for him — and among the officials in high places named in the ESPN report was Zahid.
To Lim, the report by ESPN warrants a full explanation from Zahid.
“National interests warrant Zahid making a ministerial statement in Parliament on Monday to give the nation a final full accounting,” he said.
