The Parti Solidariti Tanah Airku president says such calls often surface ahead of elections and are attempts to divert attention from the country's problems.
Kitingan said such calls were a recurring political tactic, often surfacing ahead of elections in the Philippines, the Borneo Post reported.
Padilla called on his president, Ferdinand Marcos Jr to revive the country’s claim on Sabah, arguing its oil and gas resources could solve the Philippines’s energy crisis.
Kitingan said Padilla’s remarks were “utterly nonsensical, baseless, and devoid of any legal or historical merit”.
“Sabah is not, and will never be, a solution to the Philippines’s problems,” he was quoted as saying.
He also said multiple attempts to challenge Sabah’s sovereignty had been rejected by international legal systems.
Kitingan went on to accuse Padilla of attempting to score political points by issuing irresponsible and dangerous statements.
The former deputy Sabah chief minister added that such remarks would only threaten the peace and stability of the region.
“I call upon the Philippine government to distance itself from these reckless remarks and to respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Malaysia.”
Padilla made a similar call earlier this year, prompting Sabah PKR information chief Ahmad Farid Sainuri to criticise such remarks as shallow and not grounded in reality.
Padilla, however, is not the only person from the Philippines to make such claims.
Last month, former foreign minister Saifuddin Abdullah rejected a former Filipino diplomat’s claim that the state belonged to the Philippines and said it was “baseless, flawed, and completely dead in the water”.
Fadera-Basilio claimed that the Philippines’s historical claim over Sabah represented a legitimate exercise of its international legal rights.
Saifuddin, however, said “Sabah is, and will always remain, an inseparable part of Malaysia”. - FMT
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