KUALA LUMPUR, June 13 ― PKR’s Wong Chen has suspended a welfare programme for his constituency since last week, following a faxed directive that was delivered by the Selangor government.
The first-term Kelana Jaya MP said the fax was received in the afternoon of Friday last week just prior to the end of its working hours.
“Having discussed the matter with my staff, we decided to suspend our Welfare Month program until further notice,” Wong said in a Facebook post on his official page earlier today.
Wong said more than 300 applications had already been received by his office for the welfare programme before his decision to stop it.
The MP’s staff had then put up notices informing the public of this suspension around the Desa Mentari area today, in addition to calling community leaders to inform them of the decision.
“We need to bring the message quickly to the ground so that the poor will not spend any more of their little money for transport to visit my office,” he said.
“Accordingly, my office will cease community allocations and refocus on our primary work which is the Parliamentary work of public policy research and the policy research training of our interns.”
When contacted by Malay Mail Online, Wong refused to divulge the content of the fax from Selangor government that prompted his decision.
This comes as the state government led by his own party conducted an audit on his office last month, which Wong labelled as without “due process or natural justice”.
The MP, who had his office audited for the spending of his annual RM250,000 allocation as a federal lawmaker in the state, said that the findings of the audit by the Selangor Treasury were “baseless”.
However, he admitted that the audit findings did not allege any misappropriation in his office, but instead had asked the Petaling District and Land Office to urge his office to prepare a budget proposal and to compel his office to spend more money on small projects.
Selangor Mentri Besar and PKR deputy president Datuk Seri Azmin Ali has since said the Selangor Treasury conducts its audit on elected representatives within the state independently of the executive, and the body does not come under his jurisdiction.
