KUALA LUMPUR, Feb 10 — DAP’s Hannah Yeoh and Amanah president Mohamad Sabu emphasised their respective academic qualifications today, amid controversy over dubious degrees among politicians.
Deputy Women, Family and Community Development Minister Yeoh posted a link to her page on the University of Tasmania website that listed her Bachelor of Laws and Graduate Diploma in Legal Practice.
“For the avoidance of doubt,” she said in a Facebook post with the link.
Separately, an aide to the defence minister, commonly called Mat Sabu, published excerpts from his biography emphasising the latter was expelled from the MARA Institute of Technology (ITM) due to his participation in student politics.
Both politicians appeared to be pre-empting possible allegations of doctored credentials after Local Government and Housing Minister Zuraida Kamaruddin’s Wikipedia page was manipulated anonymously.
The change falsely listed her as being a graduate from the National University of Singapore (NUS).
The Utusan Malaysia newspaper directly reported the false claim, however, leading the minister to rebuke the outlet for failing to contact her for confirmation first.
Focus on false academic qualifications began earlier this month after activist Muhsin Abdul Latheef lodged a police report over a Facebook post on February 3 asserting the University of Cambridge did not offer a distance-learning degree that Deputy Foreign Minister Datuk Marzuki Yahya supposedly possessed.
Marzuki initially sought to sidestep the issue but sleuthing by Malaysians forced him to clarify later that his degree was from the US-based Cambridge International University (CIU) rather than the prestigious UK institution.
