What companies did Tan Sri Syed Mokhtar take over? MMC, Pernas, Tanjong Pelapas Port, minority stakes in Gamuda, IJN. The list is incomplete. He is like many an UMNOPutra a stake holder for some one. He is over-extended, since he could not possibly have the tens of billions he needs to finance them and does not tap capital markets, but continues his acquisitions with abandon and without care. MMC signed an Agency agreement in Poland for Polish-made Russian tanks hours before Malaysia agreed to buy them. This former petty rice trader established his connexions with the then deputy international trade and ministry minister, Tan Sri Muhiyuddin Yassin. The latter went on to be mentri besar of Johore. And Tan Sri Syed Mokhtar became his alter ego in business. He came into the Prime Minister's orbit when he built, gratis, a mosque in Kedah. He claims connexions with Central Asia but he is, like most of Arab descent in Malaysia, from Yemen.

He runs the organisation as a bull in a china shop. He replaced the chairmen and most board members of its subsidiaries with his own men. And they run the subsidiaries as if they own it: one newly-appointed non-executive chairman voted himself executive chairman within weeks of his appointment. These changes come amidst an important change in the Tabung Haji management. Danaharta, the government Agency formed to bail out the cronies and revamp their company management, is brought in to revamp Tabung Haji after a former chairman lost nearly RM1 billion in unwise investments in Indonesia.

The public therefore adopts the usual time-honoured Bolehland method of conflict resolution: money changes hands, and the matter resolved without hassle. The government insists this is corruption, the public resort to it for its efficiency. Since the recipients are civil servants, no one talks of it. The government proclaims its high ideals and ignores the corruption, the public view that as low morals in a corrupt government. This inefficiency breeds corruption. which spreads to the PCB, and its companionn body, the Anti-Corruption Agency. It is the public, not the official, view which decides if its does its job. Dato'

Decisions are made made in secret before the formal meeting, and sprung upon in public in a seeming display of unity. Or when the mentris besar is rejuvenated by an attack of stupidity and idiocy, as in Selangor, Negri Sembilan, Penang and Johore. Dato' Seri Mohd Khir is accused of corruption, with three police reports lodged, and a call on the Anti-Corruption Agency to investigate. He himself talks of being a one-term mentri besar. The police as usual investigates these only when they are ordered it gives him some space to manouevre. But he is caught in a new political mood in which the Malays are not prepared to accept UMNO leaders if they are deemed to be corrupt. The leaders themselves find they have to offer the expendable to the wolves, as the former cabinet minister, Dato' Seri Anwar Musa, after money meant for the very poor was diverted and its director-general investigated.

In the rush to get the news across, especially in a news Agency in a breaking story as this, these mistakes occur. The story often is rewritten at the news centre, in Tokyo, London or New York (in the case of AP). This is one problem news Agency reporters face all the time. There is a deadline every minute somewhere in the world, and story once printed is rarely corrected. That has not to do with a deliberate bias, as Ashraf implies, but more human failings, and often the importance the desk gives to the mistake or, to not put a fine point to it, the subject. Would the New Straits Times as assiduously correct a deliberate misrepresentation of Mr Lim Kit Siang's, or Dato' Fadhil Noor's, views? Yet, their views are often misrepresented on its pages. If they half misreport the Prime Minister as they do the opposition readers, the retribution comes quick enough: the editor-in-chief himself could lose his job.

The Attorney-General, Datin Ainum Mohamed Said, first went on leave for one-month, which later became two. There is nothing unusual about it, except that it was not announced. When officials go on leave without any announcement for as long as this, Bolehland's favourite news Agency, Rumour, fills in the silence of the official media. At first sight, when I first heard of it last night, after a friend of her's called me, I did not know about the leave or the rumour that she was under investigation.

The Chief Secretary to the Government, Tan Sri Shamsudin Osman, has made a stupendous discovery (New Straits Times, 27 August 01, p1), so dramatic that he had to say it in the usual roundabout fashion of bureaucrats: that corruption is a problem in the civil service or, as he coyly puts it, greed is the root of graft. Thirty years after the Anti-Corruption Agency is set up, and with laws regularly tightened to control corruption, he says the law enforcement agencies "should have an internal control system that can act against people who commit corrupt practice". In other words, these agencies slept while greed encouraged graft. No one in charge bothered to address it; no one still does. Meanwhile, corruption became a cancer. It has spread to all levels of society; it is so bad now that any transaction requires the grease of money.

The Anti-Corruption Agency director-general, Dato' Zulkipli Mat Nor, when asked about the Cheras land, would not comment. "I don't wish to comment. No comments, no comments on this." Why? Because the people involved are those who belief they have a bright future in federal politics? Could the Anti-Corruption Agency refuse to comment months after it started investigations into the matter? The ACA, like Suhakam on human rights, is an embarassment to the government, set up to keep the public at bay. It was defanged in 1969 after it forced two mentris besar -- of Trengganu and Perak -- out of office for corruption. One irony of that is the ACA chief then is today deputy chairman of Suhakam -- Tan Sri Harun Hashim. The ACA now cannot, indeed do not have the power to, investigate corruption in the higher reaches of government and the National Front -- unless the person to be investigated has fallen foul of the leaders.

The Jakarta man-on-the spot should have stood up and be counted, writing the truth as he saw it. He did not. Why not? What happened to the pool coverage that Asian news agencies were to provide? Why did he not write about the misreporting when it occurred, instead of relaying his comments to his foreign editor for a blanket attack on Western reporters? It showed, if nothing else, the professionalism, or the lack of it, of the two men. I hold no brief for Western reporters, but when I do travel widely to distant spots -- yes, troubled ones, too! -- the Malayian reporters, where they exist, were adjuncts to the local information and news Agency office. You got little help, either for a rundown of what has happened or how to get to a particular place of trouble as cheaply as possible. It is always the foreign reporter, usually freelancers as I, who comes in to help. And I would them when they turn up in Kuala Lumpur.

(Badrul Zaman P.S. Md Zakariah is suing TV3 and Radio and Televisyen Malaysia for a news broadcast which allegedly depicted visuals of him in handcuffs while he was in remand for allegedly not operating a genuine employment Agency.)

There was a scandal in the Prime Minister's department, hushed up in embarassment, when a senior official was collecting RM10,000 to RM25,000 for 15-minute appointments. He apparently made a tidy pile before he retired, and does well now in the corporate world. I was told of two Tan Sriships formally approved by all concerned hijacked and given to two not even considered for the honour. So, at every turn of the wheel, money changes hands. There is no proof of this, of course, and those who paid would not talk since the Anti-Corruption Agency threatens to investigate both the giver and taker of bribes. No one is unlikely to be charged, since the finger points to those who should not be touched. But to one who has to face its inquisition, it is a terror better imagined. Besides turning one's life upside down.

Instead it attacks Dato' Seri Anwar in its media outlets, often on false premises, lashing out to no purpose, thinking this would offset the accusations levelled against it, not just by Dato' Seri Anwar. So, Dato' Abdul Kadir Jasin, who after his removal as editor-in-chief of the New Straits Times group buys over Bernama, the Malaysian news Agency, and other choice media assets, comes in to the attack in a forum widely disbelieved. Instead of a principled reasoned argument -- and one can be made if he thought hard enough -- he resorts to character assassination, which is how the Malaysian government dismisses the Anwar enigma. He takes the unusual journalistic view that a man whom government wants destroyed, and all his backers, must stay destroyed, with no right to challenge his destruction.

Ultimately judicial probity and fairplay would set the standards of justice. So long as that is questioned -- and it is, now -- justice will, for some, be an Agency to oppress litigants. Justice cannot be viewed in isolation. It must relate to the world around him. And this world puts it on notice. A former Lord president, Tun Azmi, once said he would want no more accolade than for a litigant who lost his court leaving it convinced he had had a fair hearing. That is not so now. No judge would decide against a crony business man, especially when accompanied by crony lawyers, however weak his case. He would even allow the business man's lawyer to write the judgement the business man wants. Indeed, the chief justice does not respond to an affidavit about this filed in the courts. But then could he when he goes on holiday to New Zealand with the crony lawyer and their families? Litigants are put to unnecessary expense and judicial harassement when routine orders are denied so that a higher court could decide on its merits. And lawyers cited for contempt when they pursue their clients' cases vigorously.

WHEN THE ANTI-CORRUPTION Agency, toothless at the best of times except when clerks, office boys, lower ranking civil servants, decided to investigate corruption within the Road Transport Department (JPJ) in issuing driving licences, to the accompaniment of media trumpets blaring cacophonically. It suggested a systematic web of corruption that allowed 100,000 people to obtain driving licences when they should not have. The ACA director-general, Dato' Ahmad Zaki, breathed hellfire and brimstone, as his officers raided JPJ offices in the peninsula, with news reports suggesting a web of corruption worse than any in the country. They had all the information, they said, and to back its threat, offered an amnesty by the end of September if those who obtained the licences surrepticiously owned up. The mountains roared, and brought forth a mouse. The transport minister, JPJ officials, rushed in to get the credit, countermanding each other with what would happen, so that no one is clear what would happen. The ACA so far has not isolated one syndicate nor arrested any of its leaders. Its focus is on the hapless motorist who renewed his licence through individuals and firms, lawfully registered, who renews licences and the like for a fee. There would be a few who deliberately bypass the law but many had their licences renewed in good faith.

THE UNITED NATIONS SOCIAL, Cultural and Social Organisation (UNESCO) once thought development journalism was the way of the future: all stories should have a "developmental framework" (whatever that meant), and incomplete without the obligatory genuflection towards the implements of development. Hundreds of millions of dollars later and thousands of journalists and journalist-bureaucrats went around to exotic locales to "discuss" it, it was quietly put to rest. Anyone with a contrary point of view, or were otherwise unreliable, like a tendency to call a spade a spade and not an agricultural implement, were not allowed anywhere near the conference hall, indeed were, and are, kept at the proverbial arm's length. A journalist, in its view, should not be just a journalist; he must also be savvy with the gobbledygook of international development journalism. The Afro-Asian world insists the Western media's worldview harmed its interests, and rushed to set up a news Agency guaranteed to go the way of the South Sea Bubble. The Islamic countries thought their interests were best served with an International Islamic News Agency or IINA, but it followed all politically motivated measures to control the press into oblivion. The Southern African Dialogue, in Maputo last week, proposed a news organisation to challenge the worldview of the Western media. In Kuala Lumpur, yet another UN-recognised body has decided that the way to control and regulate journalists and journalism is through press councils, meets to consider how effective this would be. Not that anything would come out of it.

That would not be on Tuesday (20 June 00), when he turned 65, but six months' hence, on 19 December 00. The extension was approved three days before he was due to retire. (The Prime Minister, on the other hand, claims he does not know if this extension is for six months, one year, or for life; that, under present circumstances, adds weight to growing belief that he, irrevocably, is in his second childhood.) Tun Eusoff, who took office under a cloud, would not retire in a cloud. He has yet to explain his incriminating holiday in New Zealand with that eminent lawyer and litigant, Dato' V.K. Lingam, nor his connexions with Dato' Lingam's valued client, the self-proclaimed internationally known business man of unquestioned repute, Tan Sri Vincent Tan. In so doing, he brought the office of the chief justice to depths unimaginable only a few years ago. And with it the judiciary. He claims the anti-corruption Agency (ACA) cleared him of all wrongdoing. He claims he "bumped" into Dato' Lingam in a New Zealand zoo. Both are lies. The ACA does not clear anyone, and Tun Eusoff and Dato' Lingam planned and went on the holiday deliberately, and without the subterfuge of a contrived accidentally meeting. Lesser individuals would have been branded liars for such economy with the truth.

He cannot, of course, admit that to Malaysians, pressured as he is on three fronts: his alienation amongst Malaysians, within his UMNO party, and in his continuing problems arising from his once-favourite deputy prime minister, Dato' Seri Anwar Ibrahim's refusal to be destroyed because he wants it. That he has massive political problems, especially with a possible challenge for the UMNO presidency, is known to any who takes even a passing interest in Malaysian affairs. In Malaysia, that information has a security classification equal to that of a state secret. He would not admit it even in his sleep. That he had had to, and for the World Economic Forum spokesman to say so to the International Herald Tribune reporter in Kuala Lumpur who enquired, makes his television appearance less than truthful. But unconnected news items that appear innocently in the mainstream media confirms this: the deputy prime minister, Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, said he was not in contact during his holiday until he arrived in London two days ago; the finance minister, Tun Daim Zainuddin, on the other hand, telling bankers and financial analysts that he was in constant daily contact. This confirms the general belief that on this overseas trip, Dato' Abdullah was sidelined as acting head of government, with that role given to the finance minister. Informal as it was, this has aroused sympathetic support for Dato' Seri Abdullah in the past fortnight, with a corresponding discordant view of the UMNO president. The Prime Minister must profer a rational explanation for this, even if he is not asked for one. The UMNO ground discusses this amidst the crisis in its national leadership.
So, beneath the placid superficial calm of Malaysian politics, the behind-the-scenes manouevrings must convince the Prime Minister of rumblings directed at him. The one man to benefit from all this is the unlikely, loyal, Dato' Abdullah Ahmad Badawi himself. The Prime Minister's continued political, strategic and political clumsiness in the matter of Dato' Seri Anwar adds to the general Malaysian belief that his nemes cannot be acquitted of the charges against him. The postponed trial began this week, amidst the UMNO branch and divisional elections. So, the mainstream newspapers and media is firmly told the ignore the trial and reduce it to that of the run-of-the-mill robbery stories in sessions courts. With the editor-in-chief of UMNO's mainstream newspaper sacked this month, few would dare ignore that directive. But this would make matters worse. But foreign news Agency reports and those in the region's newspapers would adds to Prime Ministerial credibility at home.

The government would have us believe that a HUKM report would override any private laboratory report in Melbourne. But HUKM made no attempt to contact Gribbles Laboratory, did its tests in isolation, and reported he has "no acute or chronic" arsenic poisoning and, to impress upon us its professionalism, a whole list of extraneous diseases. It did not consider or attempt to diagnose his unexpectedly falling hair, lack of apetite, unexplained weight loss and other classic symptoms of arsenic poisoning. The HUKM report does not rule out the symptoms he complains of, nor if it attempted to cure or alleviate them. Arseninc poisoning is not easily detectable. One agricultural officer could not, more than a decade ago, understand his sudden loss of hair, weight, apetite -- as Dato' Seri Anwar now complains of -- and tests the government Agency he worked for had done on him in laboratories all over the world could not detect what it was, until a poisons laboratory in the United States found it was due to arsenic poisoning. By then it was too late: the poisoning was too advanced for the antidote to work. He deteriorated swiftly, is, in his fifties, bedridden, with no sensation from the neck down, still alert, works on his computer by draggin his arms about, waiting for death. He worked with sodium arsenite, a powerful weedkiller widely used in plantations at that time. If Dato' Seri Anwar lied about his arsenic, after a well-regarded laboratory had said he suffered from acute poisoning, does it mean he lied? Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

And what does he have to say of those numerous reports of judges and ministers investigated by the Anti-Corruption Agency without action taken? Or of judges implicated of unjudicial behaviour? Is it his view that since there are no prosecutions the investigated judges and cabinet ministers are clean? That Datin Rafidah Aziz, as minister of international trade and industry did not exceed her powers by allotting concessional shares to her son-in-law, that Tun Daim damages his fiduciary responsibilities when he as finance minister approves projects submitted to him by he as minister in charge of the Economic Planning Unit, that a cabinet minister's son at 27 and without visible means of support could suddenly find himself with a line of credit from RM1,200 million? That it is all right for a lawyer for the plaintiff to write the judgement? When Tan Sri Khalil tries to put his oar into an argument without thinking, he would face more trouble than he bargained for. But first things first: is he now saying that the Malaysian judiciary's fairness and the government not influencing court decision be linked to Azizan's, not Dato' Seri Anwar's, conviction? Does this mean he accepts Dato' Seri Anwar's conviction is faulty? I would have thought that if he wanted to defend the integrity of the judiciary, he would have taken the Anwar case rather than of a man who went out for a dirty weekend and got caught.

So, despite what the mainstream newspapers insist, the issue is not cut and dry, with the National Front headed for a runaway victory from the start. As I mentioned earlier, only one Agency got the results right; now it appears likely that its head, due to retire at the end of the month, could well get an extension. There are, of course, other reasons for this, including the new defence minister refusing to accept his predecessor's confirmation of transfers and policy moves. The excoriation of the foreign media for getting the results wrong -- officially and in the mainstream media -- does not, therefore, wash. Unfortunately, the results are viewed on the basis of results, and not on the conduct of the polls that led to it. So, while the National Front and the prime minister can crow about their victory, it is too simplistic to dismiss every one who doubted it as agents of foreign interests who wanted to see a different result.

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