PAS veep: Shift focus to gov't role in NFC scandal

The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) should provide members of parliament with the minutes of its meeting on the National Feedlot Corporation (NFC) before the new parliamentary session begins next month.

PAS vice-president Mahfuz Omar, making the call today, said this would reveal the government’s failures in the scandal, which so far has focused on the NFC’s alleged abuse of a RM250 million government soft loan.

The PAC had met with several government and NFC officials on Nov 3 last year.

Mahfuz said four committees had been tasked with monitoring the National Feedlot Centre project.

"If these committees had done their job and (supervised) how the loan was spent when it was released in stages, they would have stopped the loan, but they did not," he told a press conference at the PAS headquarters in Kuala Lumpur.

One committee, he said, was the National Feedlot Centre Project Joint-Steering Committee led by then Agriculture Minister Muhyiddin Yassin, currently the deputy premier.

"(He chaired) the committee to oversee the project ... if the project failed, it is because they failed to oversee it," he said.

[More to follow]