KUALA LUMPUR, Dec 4 — Lawyer Latheefa Koya, who is also a former Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) chief, today questioned why the authorities were going after her client Albert Tei when he is just a “small fish” providing information on alleged corruption.

Latheefa asked why her client Tei was not given whistleblower protection, unlike other alleged bribe-givers who had been given protection in order to testify as witnesses in court against corruption cases.

Latheefa said it was “shocking” that Tei had been charged with corruption earlier today, when he has been exposing alleged corruption among high-ranking officials in Sabah.

“What I don’t understand is in which situation would you be able to go for corruption, if you go and charge the whistleblower or the so-called giver,” she told the media at the Kuala Lumpur court complex here, describing Tei as a “small fish” when compared against those he had allegedly been exposing.

“He’s a small fish. Go after the big fish,” she said, arguing that going after the “small fish” is not how the anti-corruption fight should be done.

Latheefa cited Lim Guan Eng’s and Datin Seri Rosmah Mansor’s corruption cases, where the alleged givers of bribes were not charged to enable them to testify as prosecution witnesses in those cases.

“But why in this case which involves Albert Tei, there’s no such consideration?” she asked.

“We are supposed to protect the whistleblower, we are supposed to protect the informant,” she said.

Latheefa said the law does not say that whistleblower protection cannot be given to a whistleblower who has been “tainted” or is part of a case, but noted that such protection can be withdrawn.

She said the authorities had refused to grant Tei whistleblower protection, and he had not been given immunity from charges as is normally given to prosecution witnesses.

Latheefa disagreed with the MACC’s actions of dressing her client Tei in an orange lock-up shirt and with handcuffs just during the remand process, saying she had disallowed this during her previous tenure as MACC chief.

“During my time, I had actually specifically given directives that no one will be put in orange shirts and handcuffed and paraded like a common criminal. That is not the way we fight corruption. That is just politics, that is just a show.

“A real government that really wants to fight corruption, they would actually deal with the informant, the whistleblower, in order to secure a proper prosecution. Not this way, this is not how it is done,” she said.

Tei, who came to the court lobby at around 2.38pm after his bail of RM70,000 had been posted, shouted “Lawan tetap lawan” once.

Tei today told the media about the details of the MACC’s alleged forced entry of his house and its arrest of him there on November 28, including how his hands had allegedly been tied up with cable ties and how his family members who were present had been affected.

He questioned the relevance of his house’s close circuit television (CCTV) recorder which the MACC had seized, and said he will continue to pursue the matter with MACC if the seized CCTV recorder’s contents go missing or are deleted.

Tei had said his account of the events during the arrest would be backed by the CCTV recordings.

“When you touch my family, I totally cannot accept. You can touch me, but you cannot touch my family,” he said after recounting events that had allegedly happened during the arrest.

 

Yesterday, MACC chief Tan Sri Azam Baki said that investigators had collected video recordings to show that his officers had not abused their powers during the raid on Tei’s house, and said MACC had acted according to the law and standard operating procedures then.

Tei’s corruption case is scheduled for case mention at the Sessions Court in Kuala Lumpur on January 8.

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