PETALING JAYA: Former minister Khairuddin Aman Razali says the authorities had never called him in for questioning for his links to an alleged land scandal involving the Malaysian Rubber Board (MRB) last year.
The Kuala Nerus MP maintained that the allegations made when he was the plantation industries and commodities minister had no merit, and the authorities would have taken action against him if there were any basis to the claims.
“Not one case has been linked to me but, as usual, politicians will try to look for and exploit people’s weaknesses.
“But until this day, the authorities have never called me up because there’s no issue. It’s all just allegations,” he said in an interview with FMT.
In May last year, an NGO claimed that Khairuddin approved the lease of land owned by the MRB for below the market rate, which the PAS MP had decried as slanderous.
These claims were backed by Umno’s Jerantut MP and former MRB chairman Ahmad Nazlan Idris, who was summoned by the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) over the alleged scandal.
The MRB had also denied the allegations, stressing that no lease agreement or sale and purchase transaction had been signed with any party for two plots of land it owned at Jalan Ampang, Kuala Lumpur.
Khairuddin maintained that it was impossible for him to approve the lease of MRB land if it did not get the board of directors’ greenlight, dismissing the issue as “cheap politics”.
He threatened to sue anyone who caused the slanderous allegations to resurface, adding that a suit had already been filed last year though he apparently did not pursue the matter further as he was “lazy to get into a fight”.
“The suit that I filed (last year) hasn’t been retracted yet, it’s there but I just haven’t made it active because there haven’t been any attacks of late. If there are people who want to accuse me again, I will sue them.”
According to the documents released by the NGO, Khairuddin allegedly approved the lease for Lot 20013 to Al-Noor Foundation at a price of 70 sen per sq ft, compared with the market price of RM2.50, for a period of 15+10 years with a 10% lease rate increase every five years.
The NGO also claimed that Lot 20012, with an area of 8.89 acres, was proposed to be sold to Eurowhite Sdn Bhd at a price of RM1,032.92 per sq ft, which is said to be below the market price of about RM1,400 per sq ft. - FMT
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