Dato’ Eric See-To
Those who question why the Royal Commission of Inquiry (RCI) on the Bank Negara (BNM) Forex scandal was not done 23 years ago in 1994 are a bit silly.
At that time, Tun Mahathir and Anwar Ibrahim was in charge and as the RCI report stated, there was a cover up of the scandal.
Why would Tun Mahathir and Anwar want to agree to a RCI then if they were allegedly busy trying to cover it up?
You could also not do the RCI 13 years ago as Tun Mahathir was still fully in charge.
If Pakatan really must question why an RCI was not conducted 23 years ago, you should ask your Pakatan Chairman Mahathir and De facto leader Anwar Ibrahim why. Because they were in charge then.
The main allegation was that there was a cover up as the amount was much bigger than parliament or cabinet was told.
In fact, the RCI also stated that the losses were hidden in BNM’s accounts and that it took ten years or 20 years to ammortize the losses.
Since 13 years ago, no one from government or who had worked for BNM at that time had come out to blow the whistle that he losses was much bigger than was reported.
It was only when Datuk Abdul Murad Khalid, the former Assistant Governor of BNM at that time shocked Malaysians in February 2017 that the losses were much bigger and claimed that there was a cover-up that the current govt called for a RCI.
Why did Datuk Murad take so long to spill the beans? You will have to ask him. Perhaps he waited until Mahathir’s influence in government was truly over? Or perhaps he could no longer stand Mahathir’s hypocrisy? We can only speculate.
As for those who said that investigating this mother of all scandal is futile because a key witness has passed away, let it be known that the then BNM Governor Jaffar Hussein passed away in 1998 – while Mahathir was still in charge, Based on their logic, it would still have been futile to investigate this crime 20 years ago.
Unlike 1MDB, no PAC session was ever held on this scandal. There was also no special Auditor’s General Report on this and neither did the police start any investigations on this.
So, what is the problem of the govt closing a chapter on this mega-scandal and uncovering the truth? If we wait any longer, even more witnesses will not be around.
Source: Eric See-To
