Polls delay gambit shattered by Deepak's disclosures

Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak's frequent deferment of the polls was always a risky strategy given the propensity of his government to suffer blowouts from ongoing disclosures of serial malfeasance.

It was figured the quicker the polls were done with the safer it would be for the PM, whereas tardiness would leave his government dangerously undermined by the sleuthing Rafizi Ramlis of the opposition, heightening in their wake the possibility of calamitous results for the ruling BN at the eventual ballot.

Now that strategy of deferral is in grave peril of coming apart at the seams on account of disclosures already made and threatened further, bodes mortal peril for Najib's tenancy as prime minister.

It's no more a question of whether it will be polls in early March or in June; it's whether it will be Najib as the PM or someone else in Umno who will make that trip to the palace to request the king for Parliament's dissolution.

Or would it be some other scenario - at this stage the possibilities are, to say the least, surreal.

The latest revelations from businessman Deepak Jaikishan have the aura of a smoking gun that could blow Najib's and wife Rosmah Mansor's cover in the Altantuya Shaariibuu murder case.

The circumstances of the murder of the Mongolian woman, with its tendrils reaching up to high places in the cabinet, military and the police, were enveloped by an august obscurity such that when two police officers were charged and found guilty of the murder, the striking absence of a motive to kill on the part of the convicted only accentuated the puzzle further.

PM's immunity wearing thin

The disclosures made by Deepak two weeks ago, when he first intimated he knew details of the Byzantine capers surrounding the murder and was willing to shed them, and which he resumed yesterday have now made the Teflon-protected aboveboard stance of the PM well nigh untenable.

Sure, the office of Umno president and prime minister of Malaysia confers a no-affect belt, a carapace, if you like, of immunity on its holder.

How else to explain the absence of a summons by the prosecutor in the Altantuya murder trial to Najib or his wife on matters connected to the trial that have a plausible link to them in their official capacities?

The revealed contents, never denied, of a mobile phone conversation Najib - defence minister at the time of the murder carried out with the aid of ordinance only available at his ministry - had with a clearly distraught aide who was being arraigned for Altantuya's murder, was either sheer coincidence or indicative of prior knowledge of incidents tied to the murder.

But immunity from a summons to account for conduct that is not exactly pristine is immunity that can only hold on the collective holding of several tongues.

Now one tongue has begun to wag such the whole aura of obscurity that has surrounded the Altantuya case may yield to the best disinfectant - sunlight.

Threat to tell all

Deepak yesterday threatened to tell all, a phrase that used to be familiar from internecine feuding among BN components parties in the 1980s.

"I will tell all," a Neo Yee Pan or an estranged ally of S Samy Vellu would pipe up, but when push came to shove in factional dramas that periodically beset BN parties in the 1980s, the public could neither trust the teller nor the tale, if at all there were more than morsels from the mouth of kiss-and-threaten-to-tell malcontents.

But the carpet dealer-cum-property developer Deepak is shaping up to be a special case of deal-and-divulge, perhaps because hell has no fury like a businessman who has been cut off at the knees as Deepak claimed he had been in a property deal he negotiated with Najib when the latter was defence minister.

Now Deepak seems determined to spill the beans on the capers that surrounded the second statutory declaration of private eye P Balasubramaniam, in which he renounced the sensational disclosures he had made in his initial SD a day earlier in July 2008.

The brace of SDs by Balasubramaniam - the lurid contents of the first SD and the equally sensational volte face of the second, combined with the disappearance of the declarer himself - was enough for the police to open an investigation, but this is a contingent that has become an adjunct of whoever holds the prime ministerial office.

Furthermore, when its supervisory ministry (Home) is in the hands of someone as feckless as the PM's cousin, nothing but a sleepwalker's insulation from reality could be expected from the personnel who should have been getting down to the bottom of it all.

But four and a half years on from the making of those SDs, and a little over six years from the murder itself, the ghost of Altantuya, like Banquo's in Shakespeare's play of a duke of vaulting ambition and his accomplice wife of nefarious design, hovers around the personages that were on the periphery of the case whose political connections obtained for them what may well turn out to be a temporary, and delusive, immunity.

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TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for close on four decades. He likes the occupation because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them. It is the ideal occupation for a temperament that finds power fascinating and its exercise abhorrent.