In mid-December 2012, a handful of Malaysia’s top lawyers adjourned for late drinks at a bar in a posh Kuala Lumpur hotel after attending a wedding.
What exactly transpired among the group of friends that evening is now the focus of a nearly two-year probe into one of the attendees, who has been accused of professional misconduct in the widely publicised murder case of a Mongolian woman nine years ago.
After six months of quizzing a dozen witnesses, including those present at the drinks party, a three-member disciplinary panel of Malaysia’s Bar Council is expected to decide in the coming weeks whether Tan Sri Cecil Abraham acted unprofessionally.
Abraham is alleged to have acted improperly by drafting a private investigator’s second sworn statement which contradicted his first.
Critics claim it was part of a conspiracy to limit the fallout from the killing of Mongolian model Altantuya Shaariibuu by two police commandos.
The officers were, at the time of her murder, members of then deputy prime minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak’s security detail.
Abraham, who declined to respond to questions for this article, has never made any public comment on allegations that first surfaced in late 2012 that he was involved in preparing the statement by the investigator.
Lawyers familiar with the tribunal proceedings say that Abraham has testified in recent months that he was not involved in any way in the making of the statement.
But the tribunal has also heard statements from other lawyers who have insisted that Abraham had privately admitted his role in drafting the sworn statement, which was also the subject of discussion at the mid-December drinks session.
Disciplinary cases are common in the Malaysian Bar Council, which counts close to 15,000 lawyers as members.
The Advocates and Solicitors Disciplinary Board – an independent body under the Bar Council empowered to investigate professional misconduct – receives as many as 600 complaints against lawyers annually. These complaints largely involve dishonesty among solicitors who misuse funds belonging to their clients.
Few have attracted the kind of intense public scrutiny as the complaint against Abraham. Here’s why.
- TMI
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