Zahid should take leave as Home Minister until two cases causing major embarrassment to the BN government had been settled

Datuk Seri Dr. Ahmad Zahid Hamidi should go on leave as Home Minister until two cases causing major embarrassment to the Barisan Nasional government had been settled.

Firstly, the case where Zahid was accused of causing hurt to Amir Abdullah Bazli in January 2006.

I agree with the former Kuala Lumpur CID director Mat Zain Ismail who said in a recent Open Letter that the fact that the Appeal Court had in a civil action unanimously ordered Zahid to answer the charges by Amir Abdullah means that Amir’s accusation is solid, raising the question why the police had failed to take action against Zahid for his offence of hurting Amir.

Mat Zain had rightly said in his Open Letter:

“PDRM will not be able to convince the people that it is acting fairly and adhering to the law if it fails to haul Zahid to court, especially when its former chief (former IGP Tan Sri Rahim Noor) was charged for the same offence.

“In fact, PDRM will lose moral ground as it cannot justify taking action against any lawbreaker, if it cannot even take action against its own Minister who has been judged a criminal by the courts.”

Secondly, the serious allegation that Zahid had violated election laws spending more than 10 times the RM200,000 expense limit for his parliamentary seat campaign in the 13th general election, to the tune of over RM2 million.

Zahid had in videos posted by himself on his official website that he had recruited 24,000 Bagan Datoh Barisan Nasional supporters, who are also local voters, as campaign workers in his run for the seat.

He also admitted, on video, to giving them RM100 and 5kg of rice each.

Apart from the election offence of money politics, it is ridiculously outrageous that Zahid should be employing 24000 “election workers” when the total electorate in Bagan Datoh parliamentary constituency is 34,670 voters and the total polled by Zahid himself is 17,176 votes – which works out to more than one “election worker” for one vote polled by Zahid, which must be a record by itself in Malaysian electoral politics.

(Media Conference Statement in Plentong, Johor Baru on Thursday, 13th June 2013 at 9 am)