Pua: Arul Kanda a ‘liar extraordinaire’

The 1MDB President and Executive Director was an “unscrupulous liar and a man without any honesty and integrity”.

 KUALA LUMPUR: The Opposition begs to differ with a 1MDB statement on Tuesday that its President and Executive Director Arul Kanda Kandasamy never said he “saw the cash” (at a Singapore bank).

“He is on record as saying he had ‘seen the statements’, referring to the fund unit ownership and redemption,” noted Petaling Jaya Utara MP Tony Pua in quoting from the statement.

“This is an outright lie to cover up another lie,” said Pua who is also DAP National Publicity Secretary.

In an interview with the Singapore Business Times published on 7 February 2015, he recalled that Arul Kanda clearly stated that while the funds amounting to USD1.103 billion would not be repatriated back to Malaysia, it would be kept in US dollars “as we have USD6.5 billion (RM23.06 billion) in bonds out there, in which interest payments come up to nearly USD400 million (RM1.4 billion) a year.”

He pointed out that the 1MDB President specifically said, “the cash is in our accounts and in US dollars. I can assure you (about that)… I have seen the statements”.

“It was therefore disingenuous for 1MDB to just quote Arul Kanda having ‘seen the statements’ without also quoting the sentence, ‘the cash is in our accounts and in US dollars’.”

“This proves that Arul Kanda was an unscrupulous liar and a man without any honesty and integrity.”

It begs the question, he added, why Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak and the Board of Directors of 1MDB still trusted such a person to manage and “turnaround” the country’s largest scandal-ridden company in history.

He reiterated that 1Malaysia Development Bhd (1MDB) President Arul Kanda was a liar extraordinaire. “His many responses within the statement did not address the key questions which key critics have raised many times previously.”

He was commenting on the 1MDB statement which, among others, made reference to the balance of USD1.103 billion of investments located in Cayman Islands which was redeemed in January this year and parked with BSI Bank Singapore. The controversy was whether this amount was “cash” or in “assets”.

Pua conceded that strictly speaking, some of the figures which were cited in former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad’s “1MDB Story” in his blog was inaccurate. “However, the gist of his arguments was definitely sound.”

Pua doesn’t buy the statement conceding that there was a misunderstanding on information provided by 1MDB to the Ministry of Finance (MoF). “This conceded ‘misunderstanding’ was completely unbelievable.”

Firstly, he wants to know whether Arul Kanda was so incompetent as to make a mistake between USD1.1 billion cash as opposed to assets or “units” of indeterminate value.

Secondly, if there was indeed a “misunderstanding” in the response provided to the MoF, the fact remains that Arul Kanda did not immediately correct the massive mistake on 10 March when the “cash” answer was provided and widely published.

Instead, he said, the 1MDB Chief waited until more than two months later on 19 May after he had posted the question again in Parliament, before issuing the correction. “If I didn’t ask the question, the truth would never have surfaced. Such a massive delay in clarifying the mistake was the height of irresponsibility by the 1MDB President.”

He asks: “Was Arul Kanda forced to finally admit that there was no “cash” in BSI Bank as a result of being caught with his pants down, after Singapore authorities handed evidence to Bank Negara Malaysia?”

Arul Kanda, he reiterated, had tried to bluff gullible Malaysians that 1MDB got back all it’s money and even “made a profit of USD488 million” in the entire Petrosaudi to Cayman transactions. “He even cooked up the excuse that the money needs to be kept in US dollars because it was needed to service the interest of 1MDB’s US dollar bonds.”